Megan Konar, Di Long, and Kaveh Madani received the Hydrologic Sciences Early Career Award at AGU’s Fall Meeting 2019, held 9–13 December in San Francisco, Calif. The award recognizes “scientists who demonstrate outstanding contributions to hydrologic sciences, education, or societal impacts and show exceptional promise of continued contributions to hydrology throughout their career.”  

Di Long is receiving the Hydrologic Sciences Early Career Award for pioneering work aimed at monitoring space–time dynamics of the water balance using remote sensing. His major contributions include development of remote sensing methods to retrieve almost every term in the land surface water balance with high accuracy and spatiotemporal resolution. Remote sensing algorithms he has developed have been incorporated into hydrological models to address snow and ice melt contributions to total runoff in alpine regions.

Di Long’s early work focused on evapotranspiration estimation using thermal infrared remote sensing. He developed parameterization schemes of energy balance for dry and wet limits of soil moisture, through interpretations of the relationships among land surface temperature, vegetation cover, and soil moisture, helping to improve earlier generations of models of spatial evapotranspiration. In later work, he expanded his research to the estimation of large-scale changes in groundwater storage using data from gravimetric satellites (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE)) and to improving the spatial resolution and reliability of water storage changes. Back in China, he developed algorithms to retrieve precipitation, river water levels, and discharge, as well as soil moisture, in the Tibetan Plateau. These have led to major improvements in the understanding of hydrological processes over alpine regions.

Rapid development of satellite remote sensing has provided an unprecedented opportunity to capture spatiotemporal variability in atmospheric and land surface processes and properties and to address scientific questions related to predictions in ungauged basins. Dr Long is positioned at the cutting edge of this exciting area of research and is destined for a stellar career combining hydrological modeling and remote sensing at large scales. Di Long’s outstanding contributions to research, his mentoring of students, and his leadership of and service to the hydrological community merit his receiving the Hydrologic Sciences Early Career Award.

—Murugesu Sivapalan, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

I am honored and delighted to receive this prestigious award. First and foremost, I am grateful to Murugesu Sivapalan for his generous nomination; the honors committee; the AGU Hydrology section; my advisors, Vijay Singh and Bridget Scanlon; and Martyn Clark, for their support. I appreciate all of the people who have helped me with my career. I was very much inspired by the groundbreaking work of many pioneers who have advanced the field of remote sensing in hydrology. I have been keenly interested in hydrology and remote sensing since my Ph.D. work under Vijay Singh at Texas A&M University. Following that, I enjoyed working with Bridget Scanlon and Laurent Longuevergne at the University of Texas at Austin, who generously helped me expand my expertise to include GRACE and land surface models. Since that time, my vision of remote sensing in hydrology has been broadened by looking at water storage changes from many different angles. This has helped me understand the strengths and limitations of different approaches and to try to capitalize on the distinct advantages of each. It is my privilege to work with many passionate students and colleagues at Tsinghua University on the hydrology of the Tibetan Plateau, which affects freshwater availability for many downstream Asian countries. The combination of remote sensing, ground measurements, and modeling has great potential for improving our understanding of hydrological processes under a changing environment, which should help to mitigate climate change impacts on society. I plan to continue to pursue this topic throughout my career. As ever more satellites are launched and more cutting-edge observation technology developed, hydrology should exploit data analytics and artificial intelligence to continue our rapid progress into the future. And last but not least, I am indebted to my parents, my wife, and my son for their strong support and enduring love. —Di Long, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China