Slovenia, and its capital, Ljubljana, are beautiful. Just stunning. I just want to get that out of the way straight off! Just look at this panorama of Lake Bled to give you some idea.

I travelled there because I was invited to lecture on communicating hydrology as part of the HydRoData summer school at the University of Ljubljana. The summer school was jointly organised by the university and the UNESCO Chair on Water-related Disaster Risk Reduction.

Students on the course learnt valuable skills on collecting, managing, and processing hydrological data, including fieldwork and coding using R. My lecture fell in the middle of the week-long programme, on September 6th.

The run-in to the lecture was not ideal. I lost most of August to an awful bout of Covid (definitely not a cold!). I don’t fly so was travelling by rail and, whilst travelling out, our return leg via Milan got cancelled due a landslide blocking all routes between Italy and France. We had to quickly book a new route via Munich*.

However, I put a lot of work into my lecture and I am proud of the content I shared with the students. Titled “Hydrology. Sci-comm. Games”, I took the students through the importance of being able to effectively communicate hydrology. I drew on my backgrounds in both research and operational hydrology to discuss specific issues around that research-practice nexus.

Me presenting at the HydRoData summer school. Picture by Nasrin Attal.

I shared some tips on constructing effective storytelling and how they can use their own passions to help engage people with their research and projects. I structured the lecture around the six key attributes, or qualities, I believe society needs from hydrologists**. These are:

• Knowledgeable
• Technical
• Practical
• Playful
• Sharing
• Collaborative

You will be hearing a lot more from regarding these six qualities as I plan to create a set of resources around them. I’m sure they’ll feature on my Floodology channel in the near-future too.

If you’d like me to share this lecture with your students or group, please do get in touch. In the meantime, here is some my awful photography that does not do Slovenia justice.

Chris

*This too was disrupted when a broken powerline closed all of Munich station. We ended up waiting nearly 6 hours for a FlixBus in a bleak car park outside Salzburg…

**Or any scientist really.