A Year of Water through the Spillway Gates

Although complete statistics for 2010 are not available as of this writing, the number of monthly submissions has exceeded those of 2009 in five of the previous nine months. The number of manuscripts published in 2010 is about 10% higher than in 2009 despite the variability in number of papers per issue; the journal-publishing business is an unsteady-flow process. The 2009 journal impact factor has hit a 5-year high, although I can take no credit for that. What encourages me the most is that Hydraulic Engineering is growing in both breadth of applications and in depth of fluid-mechanics insights. Scan the issues of the previous year, and you can see traditional articles on advances in hydraulic structure design alongside such diverse subjects as flow through vegetation, fish habitat development, river mechanics, advances in field instrumentation, dam-break modeling, sophisticated analyses of pipe flow systems, unsteady transitions between open channel and pipe flow, bridge scour, environmental fluid mechanics, and fundamental investigations on the connection between turbulence and sediment motion, to name only a few. In my estimation the legacy of Hunter Rouse, in which fluid mechanics is at the core of hydraulic engineering, is alive and well.

Much was added to the diversity in subject matter of papers published in the past year by the special December issue, “Special Issue on River Flow Hydrodynamics: Physical and Ecological Aspects.” Kudos go to the guest editors, Fotis Sotiropoulos and Panayiotis Diplas, whose efforts brought this issue to fruition.

The 2010 Journal awards were bestowed at the EWRI Congress in Providence, Rhode Island, in May. The 2010 awards are based on papers published in the Journal from July 1, 2008, to June 30, 2009. Alan J. S. Cuthbertson, David Apsley, Peter A. Davies, Giordano Lipari, and Peter K. Stansby received the 2010 Karl Emil Hilgard Prize for best paper for their paper entitled “Deposition from Particle-Laden, Plane, Turbulent Buoyant Jets,” which appeared in the August 2008 issue. The Best Technical Note Award was given to Vladimir Nikora, Scott Larned, Nina Nikora, Koustuv Debnath, Glenn Cooper and Michael Reid for their note entitled “Hydraulic Resistance due to Aquatic Vegetation in Small Streams: Field Study,” which appeared in September 2008. Craig Jones A.M.ASCE and Joseph Gailani won the Stevens Award for Best Discussion for their May 2009 discussion of “Comparison of Two Techniques to Measure Sediment Erodibility in the Fox River, Wisconsin.” Congratulations to all these award winners.

A collegial and productive annual meeting of AEs discussing current status and future goals of the Journal was held at the EWRI Congress in Providence in May 2010. Fig. 1 pictures those in attendance (except for Sung-Uk Choi, who is behind the camera—his photo appears below:

Sung-Uk Choi, Yonsei University

It has been a banner year for conferences, and I have traveled to more than my share (netbook tethered to Editorial Manager throughout and antenna tuned to finding additional outstanding AEs). It is heartening to hear so much goodwill for the Journal and its success at these professional gatherings. In addition to the 2010 EWRI Congress, I attended the Joint Federal Interagency Sedimentation Conference in Las Vegas; River Flow 2010, in Braunschweig, Germany; and the International Conference on Scour and Erosion, in San Francisco—all ably organized with many thought-provoking papers. The pipeline of innovative research results seems to be flowing full.

To meet the ever-rising load of journal submissions, we added seven outstanding researchers to our existing stellar editorial board in 2010. Sung-Uk Choi, who is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Yonsei University and a Ph.D. graduate of the University of Illinois, began his service as an AE in January 2010. His research interests include environmental fluid mechanics, sediment transport, and numerical methods in fluid mechanics, among others. Six more AEs joined us in August and September 2010.

Francesco Ballio is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Politecnico di Milano, Italy with a Ph.D. in hydraulics and fluid mechanics from the same university. Before beginning his academic career, he worked in the research and development department of a company producing hydraulic machinery in Germany. Professor Ballio’s current research activities focus on phenomena at the sediment-water interface, with specific emphasis on the mechanics of sediment transport and scour processes at both laboratory and field scales.

Francesco Ballio, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Oscar Castro-Orgaz has extensive consulting experience as a hydraulic engineer in Spain. He recently received his Ph.D. from the University of Cordoba specializing in critical flows through hydraulic structures. He currently serves as hydraulic research scientist at the Spanish National Research Council. His main research interests are weir flows, boundary layers, energy dissipation, gradually varied flows, and rapidly varied flows.

Oscar Castro-Orgaz, Spanish National Research Council

George Constantinescu is an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Iowa and IIHR-Hydroscience and Engineering. He has just returned from sabbatical as a visiting professor at ETH-Zurich. His current research interests center on advanced numerical modeling techniques applied to flows around hydraulic structures and obstructions, stratified flows, and flow and transport processes in river reaches in the vicinity of hydropower dams.

George Constantinescu, University of Iowa

Scott Socolofsky is an associate professor of coastal and ocean engineering at Texas A&M University and received his Ph.D. from MIT. Immediately after receiving his Ph.D., he served as a research associate and then division director of the Environmental Fluid Mechanics Group at the Institute for Hydromechanics, University of Karlsruhe. His current research projects are studies of turbulent mixing processes in three contexts: multiphase plumes, shallow tidal inlets, and coastal wetlands.

Scott Socolofsky, Texas A&M University

Jose G. Vasconcelos received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, after which he served on the faculty at the University of Brasilia. Recently, he has joined the faculty in the Civil Engineering Department at Auburn University. His research interests include optimization of water pumping systems, water-quality modeling in distribution systems, and air-water flows in hydraulic systems.

Jose G. Vasconcelos, Auburn University

Weiming Wu is a research associate professor at the National Center for Computational Hydroscience and Engineering (NCCHE), University of Mississippi. He earned his Ph.D. from Wuhan University of Hydraulic and Electric Engineering, China, after which he was a lecturer/associate professor at his alma mater and then a research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Institute for Hydromechanics, University of Karlsruhe. He has developed a suite of computational models for flow, sediment transport, pollutant transport, and aquatic ecology in riverine and coastal waters and published a book entitled Computational River Dynamics.

Weiming Wu, University of Mississippi

These new AEs join us from a variety of research backgrounds, and all of them have significant international experience in hydraulic engineering. I look forward to working with them as well as the current Editorial Board in the years to come.

As outlined in my first Editor’s Note a year ago, my overarching goal is to not only maintain but to continue the rise in impact and in the national and international prominence of the Journal of Hydraulic Engineering. The path to achieving this goal is not necessarily linear. To a certain extent, the goal can only be accomplished one manuscript at a time through the entire peer-review chain of authors, reviewers, associate editors, and editor. The official ASCE standard for acceptance of manuscripts is to maintain a high quality of papers based on criteria of “originality of approach, concept and/or application; profundity; and relevance to the civil engineering profession.” To be more specific, I think that it is fair to say that we are looking for papers that combine solid experimental and/or field results with state-of-the art numerical analysis or new analytical models, as well as for innovative experimental papers that include comparisons with other experimental and field data, presentation of results in terms of dimensionless variables with discussion of scale effects, inclusion of a substantive error analysis, and a strong discussion of fluid mechanics insights, in addition to practical implications of the results. To the extent possible, papers that reflect the breadth of current hydraulic engineering practice are sought through regular submissions, invited papers, and special issues; but some submitted papers may be recommended for transfer to other types of journals on a case-by-case basis. These criteria are not all-inclusive by any means, but the emphasis is in any case emphatically on novelty of the contribution of the paper and its relevance to hydraulic engineering.

To ensure that papers of the highest quality are published in the Journal, every member in the chain of peer review has responsibilities for its success: (1) authors are responsible for clear and incisive presentations that are well supported; (2) reviewers are responsible for a critical yet balanced review; and (3) editors are responsible for obtaining thorough and competent reviews and making impartial judgments to arrive at a final decision. The time required to complete this process is also a responsibility of every member of the peer-review chain. Although the goal of timely completion of the review process may encourage submission of the best papers, it is at the same time a goal that can only be accomplished with teamwork: timely reviews, editor decisions, and author revisions. I encourage authors to recognize that in most cases, reviewers and editors can greatly improve the quality of papers even though it may not be as fast as desirable in the current academic and professional environment of instant validation by publication; nevertheless, we are continuously working to reduce manuscript turnaround times.

If this overview of goals seems somewhat nonspecific, it is because I am convinced of the value of the peer-review process in reaching the overall goal of a high-quality journal despite its sometimes convoluted path to final decisions and its unrelenting demands on editors. I have read many reviews and editor decisions in the past year that qualify for publication in their own right for the insights that are freely offered to authors. It is an unheralded volunteer service to the profession; yet, it may be the only sure way to fully satisfy the goals of quality assurance and quality improvement on which the reputation of the Journal and the advancement of our profession depend.

Perhaps most of the Journal readers are aware of the untimely passing of Professor Gerhard Jirka (1944–2010) at the University of Karlsruhe this past year (Rodi 2010). His career truly spanned two continents, beginning at Cornell where he was founder and director of the Defrees Hydraulic Laboratory, with many service commitments to ASCE (chairman of the Hydraulics Division) and ending as recently retired director of the Institute for Hydromechanics at the University of Karlsruhe (now Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) with unparalleled service to the International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research (IAHR). Yet in another sense it is not an ending because his professional contributions will endure; he left behind many important research innovations in environmental fluid mechanics, visions for the future of IAHR and hydraulic engineering, and untold numbers of academicians and practitioners who were beneficiaries of his generous mentorship.