A SURVEY OF HYDROLOGY COURSE CONTENT IN NORTH-AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES

This report presents the results of a survey of hydrology faculties of colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. Information is presented on topics covered in classes, allocation of class periods to individual topics, textbooks, prerequisites, computer use, and accreditation categories for hydrology courses offered by engineering departments. Hydrology courses generally require courses in fluid mechanics, mathematics, statistics, and computer science as prerequisites. Topics that receive the largest allocation of time in both introductory and advanced courses include rainfall-runoff relations, the hydrologic cycle, routing and open channel flow, and statistics. Advanced courses place greater emphasis on watershed models than do the introductory courses. Hydrology courses at both levels allocate the smallest amounts of time to snow hydrology, ground-water hydrology, and "other topics." Very few courses include field or experimental work. In a discipline where computer modeling is a major tool, this lack of field and data-collection experience may lead students to underestimate the uncertainties associated with data used to calibrate models and the modeling results themselves. Survey responses on hydrology courses taught in departments other than civil engineering were too few to permit detailed analysis. Most of these courses spend approximately two-thirds of available class time on the same topics as presented in engineering hydrology courses. The balance of class time is spent on topics that emphasize the specialized interest of the particular discipline, such as soil physics and soil moisture in agricultural engineering.