Professor Murugesu Sivapalan shares how the field of hydrology has evolved over the past few decades, on Season 2, Episode 5 of the Water Data Podcast.

Prof Murugesu Sivapalan is the Chester and Helen Siess Endowed Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr Sivapalan is an award-winning academic and was founding chair of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) Decade on Predictions in Ungauged Basins (PUB) initiative. His work on Predictions in Ungauged Basins as well as in socio-hydrology have shaped the discipline of hydrology as we know it today.

Host Veena Srinivasan talks to Dr Sivapalan about his rich career of starting out with hydrological modeling, and early explorations into collecting and analysing hydrological data to infer how complex catchment and river basin systems functioned.

Hydrology is the science of the movement, distribution and management of water. Dr Sivapalan walks us through how the ‘Predictions in Ungauged Basins’ decade pushed people to better understand the physical processes around the hydrological cycle, beyond statistical analyses and calibrated models. He shares how catchments co-evolved with the biology they sustained, and how they shaped each other.

Dr Sivapalan goes on to talk about socio-hydrology, and how human activities also shape river basins and water systems, and vice versa. He explores how it is impossible to understand water systems today without paying close attention to human behaviour and human actions.

The Water Data Podcast is a talk show on the science, systems, and stories of water hosted by Veena Srinivasan.

For all references and further readings related to the episode, visit https://welllabs.org/wdp-sivapalan/

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Recording by Nabina Chakraborty. Video editing by Nabina Chakraborty. Graphics and artwork by Aparna Nambiar. Audio mixing and mastering by Vijay Doiphode. Podcast production and management by Nabina Chakraborty and Pavan Srinath.

The episode focuses on the role and use of data for corporate water stewardship. Our guests Hari Hegde from Wipro Limited and Jason Morisson from the CEO Water Mandate and the Pacific Institute join us to talk about business action, how businesses can become water efficient and how data ties into these questions. They walk us through their journey with corporate water stewardship.

The Water Data Podcast is a talk show on the science, systems, and stories of water hosted by Veena Srinivasan. Every other Tuesday, sit down and listen to researchers, innovators, government officials and business leaders working on the forefront of water systems.

This episode was originally uploaded in 2021, and is hosted by Nirat Bhatnagar, Partner at Dalberg, and Veena Srinivasan. The episode has been re-uploaded in 2025.

In this episode, Ranjiv Khush from Aquaya Institute and Dr. Sunderrajan Krishnan from INREM foundation walk us through their journey with water data and its connections with water quality and public health. They discuss why water quality is important to them, the different facets of measuring water quality, different approaches to data-driven solutions towards better public health and the bottlenecks to scaling them.

The Water Data Podcast is a talk show on the science, systems, and stories of water hosted by Veena Srinivasan. Every other Tuesday, sit down and listen to researchers, innovators, government officials and business leaders working on the forefront of water systems.

This episode was originally uploaded in 2021, and is hosted by Nirat Bhatnagar, Partner at Dalberg, and Veena Srinivasan. The episode has been re-uploaded in 2025.