Hydraulic Engineering: A Rising Wave of Progress

We have accomplished much in hydraulic engineering research in the past year. Our journal has contributed to the transfer of research results to ensure a vibrant future for our profession and will continue to do so.

Progress in hydraulic engineering research can be painfully slow sometimes, but subtle, significant markers indicate that we are navigating the right course. Awards that recognize important advances and contributions to research are one type of marker, and it has been a good year in that respect. I will discuss some journal statistics that seem to indicate that we are riding an upward trajectory in our journey. Finally, I have attended three conferences this year and listened to colleagues and associate editors from around the world, to provide an unscientific sample but nevertheless a revealing guidepost that great accomplishments are ahead. I especially enjoy listening to young people who are beginning their careers in hydraulic engineering because their enthusiasm reminds me of the early days of my own career.

Selecting awards for best technical papers, technical notes, and discussions is an arduous process that begins with a list of well over 100 nominees; that is, all papers are considered. First, associate editors nominate candidates from the full list of published papers that includes reviewer ratings. Appointed subcommittees for each award then pare down the nominees through a round-robin grading of each paper on a scale of 1 to 5. Once the subcommittees narrow the field to four or five papers, they vote until a winner can be declared.

Papers eligible for awards in 2012 are those published from July 2010 through June 2011, with the selection of winners occurring in October and November 2011. Winners were announced at the 2012 ASCE/EWRI World Environmental and Water Resources Congress in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

I congratulate the award winners not only for the deserved recognition, but also for the subject matter of their papers. The first two papers are related to ecological processes and their enhancement, while the discussion pertains to an old subject made new by concerns for the safety of levees and dams subject to overtopping in extreme floods. These contributions push us forward into new frontiers and keep us relevant to the design side of hydraulic engineering as applied to current engineering problems.

Quantitative measures of journal progress are difficult to devise and interpret, but they give some idea of trends. New submissions to the Journal of Hydraulic Engineering (JHE) have increased by 48% from January through August 2012 in comparison to the average monthly values for 2010 and 2011. In my view, this means that the journal has become an increasingly attractive venue for authors.

Although they are somewhat controversial and perhaps even misleading, journal impact factors have become a metric at many universities for relative influence of journals in a particular field. The journal impact factor is defined as the number of citations in a particular year to articles published in the journal in the previous two years divided by the number of articles published in the previous two years. Our journal impact factor for 2011 was 1.429 (Thomson Reuters 2011), which is a value that has doubled since 2001 and is currently the highest of all ASCE journals, although several other ASCE journals are not far behind. This impact factor ranks as number 20 among 118 journals in the category of civil engineering, which represents the 83rd percentile. Our journal is also number 30 of 78 in the general category of water resources journals. Our 5-year impact factor, which may be more representative for engineering journals, given the slower rate at which new articles seem to be incorporated into the literature, is significantly higher, at a value of 1.862. Whether one can set much store in the impact factor as a measure of excellence is a subject open to debate. It is nevertheless a statistic that is likely to continue to be used at least in the academic community.

The top 10 downloads of JHE articles in the first six months of 2012 are shown in Table 1. I see here further evidence of the professional interest in articles that are expanding the breadth of the scope of the journal. To me, this is additional confirmation that we are indeed on the right track for the future.

Articles in the expanding areas of environmental protection and restoration, advanced numerical modeling, and river morphology continue to be published and are represented in Table 1. At the same time, we are not abandoning our core subjects related to hydraulic structures, which I would place in a larger category of articles on infrastructure maintenance and renewal that includes water distribution system design and analysis of transients as well as traditional spillway design, for example. The significant interest in the report of the ASCE/EWRI Task Committee on dam and levee breaches attests to the current importance of the subject of safety of large hydraulic structures. Bridge scour, sediment transport, and environmental fluid mechanics are also subjects of continuing research because of the complexity of environmental flows and their interaction with boundaries. Last but not least, fundamental and applied research in the areas of open-channel flow resistance (including vegetation) and the role of turbulence in the initiation of sediment motion are alive and prospering with exciting new advances in recent journal articles.

I must admit that it seems like I spent my whole summer traveling, but in fact I took only three conference trips for the purposes of attending meetings, making paper presentations, and soliciting invited papers for the journal.

In May, I attended the ASCE/EWRI World Environmental and Water Resources Congress in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where we held our annual associate editor’s meeting (Fig. 1). Topics of discussion included ways of improving turnaround time; intricacies of Editorial Manager, which is our online submission system; journal statistics; website enhancements; and several other topics. A number of new ideas on how to better tell the story of our journal and the importance of its future as a conduit for advances in hydraulic engineering were generated, and several have already been implemented.

In August, I attended the Hydraulic Measurements and Experimental Methods (HMEM) conference in Snowbird, Utah. There I met several more of our associate editors, including Colin Rennie, Scott Socolofsky, and David Zhu. Also in attendance was Chris Rehmann, to whom we owe a great debt for his past service as an associate editor for JHE; he has stepped down because of a heavy university administrative load. I was privileged to introduce and present the 2012 Hunter Rouse Hydraulic Engineering Lecture Award to Marcel Garcia as a representative of the EWRI Hydraulics and Waterways Council. I was most impressed by papers at the conference on novel measurement technologies for both sediment and water discharge and on the assessment of measurement uncertainty using both new and traditional field instrumentation. These are topics that are likely to appear more in coming issues of the journal.

Finally, in late August I attended the Sixth International Conference on Scour and Erosion, held at Arts et Métiers, ParisTech. Provocative discussions on a number of topics in the bridge scour area were led by associate editors in attendance: Francesco Ballio, Yee-Meng Chiew, Panos Diplas, Bruce Melville, and Fotis Sotiropoulos. Interesting papers on advances in numerical modeling of scour, scour of fractured rock, vegetation used for channel stability against erosion, risk assessment of bridge scour, field-scale tests of protection schemes for overtopping of earthen embankments, and sediment management in reservoirs to assure a long-term and sustainable water supply were also presented. All these are topics that I hope will be covered in future articles in JHE.

Presenters Gijs Hoffmans and Henk Verheij of Deltares and Delft University of Technology challenged participants to chart a road map for the future that advances the state of the art of numerical modeling to the point that physical models will no longer be needed in scour analysis. It is a worthy challenge, but my sense is that there will continue to be synergism between experimentalists and numerical modelers working together for at least the near future.

My strong impression is that it is a good time to be a hydraulic engineer in spite of the faltering economy. As indicated by publishing activity in the journal, as well as recent conference presentations, many technical infrastructure and environmental research questions remain to be answered in the years ahead. In addition, changes in publishing models present challenges to the dissemination of technical knowledge. As I enter my last year of a 4-year tenure as chief editor, I plan to write about the problems and opportunities we face in the future with respect to our current model of peer review and publication. Open-source journals, primary electronic distribution, author demands for faster and faster turnaround times, massive online course learning resources, Internet piracy of textbooks, and many other issues must be met head on with an updated model of the delivery of research advances and technical information. We must be ready for the challenge.