Stockholm Water Prize 2022 awarded to Wilfriend Brutsaert
Renowned hydrologist Professor Wilfried Brutsaert, affectionately called ‘Mr Evaporation’, has been awarded the Stockholm Water Prize 2022 for his groundbreaking work to quantify environmental evaporation, helping to make accurate predictions of the impact that climate change has on local rainfall patterns and water sources.
Professor Emeritus Brutsaert, who has been associated with the US-based Cornell University for the past 50 years, is the world’s leading authority on terrestrial evaporation. Such evaporation is a crucial aspect of the water cycle but very difficult to measure or estimate, particularly on a local level.
Professor Brutsaert’s work has helped provide tools to overcome this difficulty and he has developed ways to quantify evaporation and its role in the Earth’s energy balance, allowing for more accurate estimations of how precipitation is likely to evolve. This is of particular importance to exposed local communities needing to predict how much water is available today and how much will be available in the future, said a Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) statement.
The Stockholm Water Prize is awarded by Stockholm-based SIWI in cooperation with the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
“Professor Brutsaert is a top hydrologist and a leader in land-atmosphere coupling research. His innovative works on evaporation and hydrology are of lasting theoretical and practical importance, particularly in view of climate change. In addition, Wilfried Brutsaert has pioneered novel approaches to understanding changes in groundwater storage”, said Stockholm Water Prize Nominating Committee in its citation.
“Wilfried Brutsaert has helped us substantially, to better understand the critically important aspects of evaporation, giving us invaluable tools to predict climate change effects and ultimately increase our chances of shaping a sustainable future”, said SIWI Executive Director Torgny Holmgren.
Professor Brutsaert is of Belgian origin. He has lived in the US for five decades and is William L Lewis Professor in Engineering Emeritus at the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University. Amongst his written work are the seminal Evaporation into the Atmosphere (Springer) and the broader Hydrology: An Introduction (Cambridge).
Speaking after the announcement, Professor Brutsaert said, “This is essential information to have when planning our societies. We must know how much water we will have in order to understand how much more a city can expand, or if we can allow industries to settle in a certain area.”
“Winning the Prize is a great honour and I hold previous winners and their expertise in the highest regard. For me, this feels like a confirmation that my years spent researching and teaching may have caused some good.”
