Günter Blöschl took office on December 31, 2024, and will maintain his dual affiliation with his Alma Mater, the Vienna University of Technology.
Günter Blöschl is a hydrologist renowned for studying the movement of water, the lifeblood of the planet, within the landscape. He has earned a global reputation for uncovering the reasons behind the changing patterns of floods and droughts, a mystery that has long perplexed the scientific community.
His vision in Earth Sciences has consistently focused on understanding patterns and processes. During a Postdoctoral stay in Australia, he introduced a theoretical framework that connected spatial and temporal patterns through characteristic scales, at a time when the concept of scale was poorly understood in hydrology. This framework has since been widely adopted as evidenced by citations across 40 disciplines.
In an influential series of papers, he revealed the fundamental processes linking soil moisture patterns to floods and droughts. He pioneered the development of a systematic soil moisture data acquisition system specifically designed to measure patterns and their space-time dynamics - an ambition that seemed far beyond reach just a few years earlier. He also led the global Prediction in Ungauged Basins (PUB) research initiative, synthesizing the work of over 200 scientists worldwide into a monograph published by Cambridge University Press.
As part of his ERC Advanced Grant, he made significant strides in understanding flood change mechanisms by linking elemental hydrological processes to global change patterns through the concept of scale and scaling relationships. His research also delved into the feedbacks between human activities and floods/droughts, contributing to the emerging field of socio-hydrology, of which he is a cofounder. For instance, his work has highlighted the growing flood risks in Western societies due to feedback loops between levee construction and river floodplain processes.
The impact of Blöschl’s work is reflected in his citation record, with more than 30,000 citations in Web of Science and 50,000 in Google Scholar, highlighting the global influence of his research.
He established a unique, multi-year, interdisciplinary PhD program at the Vienna University of Technology. This program integrates water, biogeochemical, and ecological processes, and to date, over 70 PhD students have graduated from it, furthering the next generation of scientists in this field.
Günter Blöschl graduated from the Vienna University of Technology. His international experience includes appointments as a research fellow in Vancouver, Canberra and Melbourne. In 2007 he was appointed Chair of Hydrology and Water Resources Management at the Vienna University of Technology. In 2024 he was appointed full professor (part time) of Hydraulic and Maritime Engineering and Hydrology at the University of Bologna.
He has received numerous honours during his career. He was elected member of the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE), the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), the German Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech), and the Academy of Sciences of the Institute of Bologna. He was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant on Deciphering River Flood Change. He received the Robert E. Horton Medal from the American Geophysical Union, the John Dalton Medal from the European Geophysical Union, and the International Hydrology Prize from the IAHS. From 2017 he published 5 articles in Nature and 2 in Science, focusing on river floods and droughts.
He has served the community in numerous capacities, including as a senator of the Helmholtz Association, Germany, as a president of the European Geosciences Union, and a president of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS).
