Hydrology, science that deals with the waters of Earth—their properties, behavior, and

distribution. Hydrologists, as scientists in this field are called, study the occurrence, distribution, and
circulation of Earth’s waters as well as their chemical and physical properties and their interaction with
the environment and living things. The research that these scientists do is important in developing,
managing, and controlling water resources. Key applications of hydrology include controlling floods,
cleaning up water pollution, generating hydroelectric power, and planning recreational uses of rivers,
lakes, and other waters.
The science of hydrology grew out of the desire to know why the oceans do not rise even though
the world’s rivers continually empty great volumes of water into them. Once people came to realize that
water could change its state from a liquid to a vapor (gas) through the application of heat, it became clear
that the heat of the Sun on the ocean surfaces continually converts water to vapor.

It was along the Indus in Pakistan, the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia, the Hwang Ho in
China, and the Nile in Egypt that the first hydraulic engineers created canals, levees, dams, subsurface
water conduits, and wells as early as 5000-6000 years ago. Hydrologic information became vital to these
early civilizations. The flow rates and yields of rivers were monitored by the Egyptians as early as 3800
years ago, and rainfall measuring instruments were first utilized approximately 2400 years ago by
Kautilya of India. The idea of a global hydrologic cycle dates back at least 3000 years when early Greek
philosophers including Thales, Anaxagoras, Herodotus, Hippocrates, Plato, and Aristotle conceptualized
the basic ideas governing the process. Many initial ideas established by the Greeks about the hydrologic
cycle were reasonable. However, many of the initial mechanisms concerning the routes by which water
returned from the sea and entered rivers were devoid of as much logic. Despite the apparent gaps in
hydrologic mechanisms, the Romans developed aqueduct systems reflecting an extensive practical
understanding of hydrology and hydraulics, and did so utilizing the basic hydrologic ideas established and
passed along by the Greeks (Dingman 1994).

During the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci (1500) in France proclaimed on the basis of field
observations that the waters in rivers come from precipitation. It was during that time that any unrealistic
mechanisms proclaimed by the Greek philosophers concerning the hydrologic cycle were either refuted or
modified. In the seventeenth century, the modern scientific approach to studying the hydrologic cycle was
initiated by the Frenchmen Pierre Perault and Edme Marriotte. By the 1670’s and 1680’s, they had
published data and calculations that supported the contention that precipitation was the precursor to stream
flow. By 1700, Edmun Halley, an English scientist added to the work of Perault and Marriotte by
estimating the quantity of water involved in the hydrologic cycle of the Mediterranean Sea and
surrounding lands. Substantial progress was made during the eighteenth century in applications of
mathematics, fluid mechanics, and hydraulics by scientists like Pitot, Bernoulli, Euler, Chezy, and other
European professionals. The term “hydrology” arrived in its current meaning around 1750, and by 1800
the work of English physicist and chemist John Dalton solidified the current understanding of the global
hydrologic cycle.

Until the 1800s, the physical processes governing groundwater flow had confounded scientists and created
barriers to understanding the hydrologic cycle. These barriers were eliminated in 1856, when the French
engineer Henry Darcy introduced his law describing flow through porous media. Other advances in the
hydrological sciences were made throughout the 1800s. Poiseuille, DuPuit, DuBoys, Stokes, Manning,
Reynolds, and others made substantial contributions to fluid mechanics, hydraulics, and sediment
transport during this period. Also during the 1800s, literary publications began to surface, with increasing
frequency in the last half of the century. Many works examined relationships between precipitation and
streamflow out of necessity for engineers designing bridges and other structures. It was during this time
that the close association between hydrology and civil engineering was established. Daniel Mead
published the first English-language text in hydrology in 1904 and Adolf Meyer followed with his text in
1919. Both texts were written for civil engineers. The association of hydrology and civil engineering
established during this time has been argued as having both enhanced as well as possibly inhibited the
development of hydrology as a science. The first half of the twentieth century saw great advancements in
the hydrological sciences starting with the addition of the Section of Scientific Hydrology in the
International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics in 1922. This was followed by the addition of the
Hydrology Section of the American Geophysical Union in 1930. These were the first formal recognitions
of the scientific status of hydrology. Many individuals contributed substantially in their areas of
hydrologic expertise during the early and middle decades of the 20th century, including: A. Hazen, E. J.
Gumbel, H. E. Hurst, and W. B. Langbein with regard to statistical applications of hydrologic data; O. E.
Meinzer, C. V. Theis, C. S. Slichter, and M. K. Hubbert who contributed to the development of theoretical
and practical aspects of groundwater hydraulics; L. Prandtl, T. Von Karman, H. Rouse, V. T. Chow, G. K.
Gilbert, and H. A. Einstein in sediment transport and stream hydraulics; R. E. Horton and L. B. Leopold
who contributed greatly to runoff processes and quantitative geomorphology; W. Thornthwaite and H. E.
Penman in furthering the understanding of hydroclimatalogical processes and modeling
evapotranspiration; and A. Wolman and R. S. Garrels who contributed greatly to the understanding and
modeling of water quality. It was not until the 1960s that detailed field studies attempting to understand
the physical processes by which water enters streams began to emerge. With the emergence of the twenty-
first century, many new breakthroughs in the hydrological sciences are eminent. In the forthcoming years,
breakthroughs will describe the relationships between hydrological regimes to current and future climate
change, and the effects of hydrologic processes on landform development. New findings will also include
modeling of regional evapotranspiration rates and geomorphologic water transport.