Water, Water Everywhere

Terry W. Sturm

With great humility I have accepted the position of editor of the Journal of Hydraulic Engineering (JHE) beginning this month. It is not an opportunity that I ever expected to receive, nor a decision that I have taken lightly. I appreciate the encouragement offered by past JHE editors Dennis Lyn, Pierre Julien, and Rob Ettema, as well as that of Steve McCutcheon who is a past editor of the Journal of Environmental Engineering. They variously described their experience as editor as one of their most satisfying services to the profession. It is in that spirit that I begin this odyssey in the latter part of my career with the hope that I can bring some measure of wisdom, good judgment, and fairness to the process on which advances in our profession depend. In fact, much of the real work is done by hundreds of reviewers and the associate editors who are dedicated to sifting through manuscripts in great detail to maintain the high standard of quality that we have all come to expect from JHE. The one overriding objective in my tenure as editor is to continue the growth in quality of journal articles and the international respect that the Journal now enjoys due to the past hard work of my predecessors.

In the past three or four decades, there have been important advances in the field of hydraulic engineering, and I would submit that it is an exciting time to be a hydraulic engineer. My colleagues at Georgia Tech in structural engineering like to jokingly tell me that not much change has occurred in hydraulic engineering because water still flows downhill. My usual rejoinder is that I can create a gravity flow in a laboratory flume that flows uphill on an adverse slope. Perhaps more to the point, rivers do still run to the sea, but as hydraulic engineers it has become our task to see that they do so in an environmentally sustainable and ecologically sensitive manner. Along the way, the river finds our structures that are so important to the beneficial use of water and mitigation of the consequences of extreme hydrologic events. Dams form reservoirs that store water for hydropower, flood damage mitigation, water supply, irrigation, and recreation while being protected by spillways. Culverts and bridges allow safe passage of transportation systems over streams and rivers, but with a concomitant assessment of risk of failure associated with hydrologic variability. The mapping of floodplains assists local governments in developing nonstructural measures for flood damage mitigation but only if the maps are updated often in urban areas. Measurement and tracking of sediment fluxes and their associated contaminants in rivers is vital to the protection of public health and the management of sediment clean-up methods. Stream ecosystems can be restored through reconnection of the river to its floodplains and vegetative protection of unstable riverbanks caused by urbanization and unwise management of surface water resources in the past. Fish passage structures preserve fish spawning behavior that sustains an essential link in the food chain. Indeed, I would suggest that we as hydraulic engineers take very seriously the missive of Luna Leopold (1997) to consider the effects of our engineering capabilities “with a modicum of reverence for rivers.” In addition to surface water protection, pump-and-treat groundwater systems, and groundwater pumping schemes that forestall saltwater intrusion and contain contaminant plumes are measures to protect our valuable groundwater resources. The list of modern hydraulic engineering applications goes on and will continue to do so as worldwide population growth relentlessly applies pressure to our scarce water resources, which are distributed neither spatially nor temporally to accommodate all of the demands that we make on them.

In the midst of such an explosion of responsibilities for the modern hydraulic engineer, the engineering toolbox has been filled with tools that help us meet the daunting challenges before us. Acoustic Doppler velocimeters, acoustic Doppler current profilers, and particle image velocimetry have revolutionized the task of velocity and turbulence data collection in laboratory and field settings. Now we can see flow fields in their full three-dimensional glory and have begun discovering the intricacies of coherent turbulent structures that participate in bridge scour and dune migration processes, for example. It is as though we can don our red and green-lensed 3D cinema glasses and see inside the world of fluid mechanics as it really is rather than having to settle for its inadequate two-dimensional or one-dimensional representations.

No less exciting is the tremendous growth in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in the past few years assisted by the computational power of parallel computer processors. Large-eddy simulation has already begun to help us understand turbulence and its interaction with stream beds to a level of detail that we could only imagine in the past. This improved understanding of the process physics can only lead to future engineering innovations and enlightened designs for the protection of bridge foundations from scour and more efficient operation of hydraulic structures, for example. In other words, the long-touted promise of CFD has begun to be realized, but within the context of parallel experimental investigations to yield enhanced results and insights. In fact, CFD can be used to guide experimental investigations, and vice-versa. It has become increasingly apparent to me that we are rapidly developing the tools to respond to the lament of Jack Kennedy (1989) that the field of modern physics has advanced much more rapidly than our understanding of river mechanics, the chosen fields of the Einsteins, father and son, respectively.

Within the context just described, my vision as editor is for the Journal of Hydraulic Engineering to become the meeting place for these exciting advances in our field. This can be achieved, I believe, through a careful mix of full papers, technical notes, and case studies that provide the focal point of technical discussion by academics and practitioners alike. I will also be suggesting special issues as the need arises to highlight specific pockets of forward momentum in research, and using either forum articles or invited papers to cross over into fields that begin to touch our own more and more, such as aquatic biology and climate change in terms of the infrastructure challenges that it poses.

In closing, I would like to exhort you as authors to submit your best papers to JHE: well-written, carefully argued, and strongly supported contributions to the advancement of our profession.