Articles | Volume 29, issue 2
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-29-465-2025
Special issue:
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-29-465-2025
Opinion article
 | 
23 Jan 2025
Opinion article |  | 23 Jan 2025

HESS Opinions: Towards a common vision for the future of hydrological observatories

Paolo Nasta, Günter Blöschl, Heye R. Bogena, Steffen Zacharias, Roland Baatz, Gabriëlle De Lannoy, Karsten H. Jensen, Salvatore Manfreda, Laurent Pfister, Ana M. Tarquis, Ilja van Meerveld, Marc Voltz, Yijian Zeng, William Kustas, Xin Li, Harry Vereecken, and Nunzio Romano

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Cited articles

Addor, N., Newman, A. J., Mizukami, N., and Clark, M. P.: The CAMELS data set: catchment attributes and meteorology for large-sample studies, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 21, 5293–5313, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-5293-2017, 2017. 
Addor, N., Nearing, G., Prieto, C., Newman, A. J., Le Vine, N., and Clark, M. P.: A ranking of hydrological signatures based on their predictability in space, Water Resour. Res., 54, 8792–8812, https://doi.org/10.1029/2018WR022606, 2018. 
Alvarez-Garreton, C., Mendoza, P. A., Boisier, J. P., Addor, N., Galleguillos, M., Zambrano-Bigiarini, M., Lara, A., Puelma, C., Cortes, G., Garreaud, R., McPhee, J., and Ayala, A.: The CAMELS-CL dataset: catchment attributes and meteorology for large sample studies – Chile dataset, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 22, 5817–5846, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-22-5817-2018, 2018. 
Anderson, S. P., Bales, R. C., and Duffy, C. J.: Critical Zone Observatories: Building a network to advance interdisciplinary study of Earth surface processes, Mineral. Mag., 72, 7–10, 2008. 
Arora, B., Kuppel, S. , Wellen, C., Oswald, C., Groh, J., Payandi-Rolland, D., Stegen, J., and Coffinet, S.: Building Cross-Site and Cross-Network collaborations in critical zone science, J. Hydrol., 618, 129248, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2023.129248, 2023. 
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The Unsolved Problems in Hydrology (UPH) initiative has emphasized the need to establish networks of multi-decadal hydrological observatories to tackle catchment-scale challenges on a global scale. This opinion paper provocatively discusses two endmembers of possible future hydrological observatory (HO) networks for a given hypothesized community budget: a comprehensive set of moderately instrumented observatories or, alternatively, a small number of highly instrumented supersites.
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