Preface special issue: Weather radar and hydrology

This article is a preface to a special issue journal that has been initiated in parallel to the International Symposium Weather Radar and Hydrology, held in Grenoble and Autrans, France, in March 2008. This event continues a series of symposia originally called Hydrological Applications of Weather Radar that started in 1989 at the University of Salford, UK. This first symposium was followed by the Hannover (1992), Sao Paulo (1995), San Diego (1998), Kyoto (2001) and Melbourne (2004) meetings. The main objective of the 2008 symposium was to promote the use of quantitative precipitation estimates (QPE) derived from weather radar technology in hydrological sciences and their applications. The symposium was composed of two events: (i) A 3-day conference held on 1012 March 2008 in Grenoble. The programme was composed of 5 keynote speeches, 52 oral and 80 poster presentations covering the multiple aspects of radar physics, radar QPE and distributed hydrological modelling. This scientific material (abstracts, extended abstracts, oral presentations) can still be accessed on the symposium web site at the following address: http:// www.wrah-2008.com. (ii) A 2-day workshop held on 1314 March 2008 in Autrans (Vercors). The workshop was dedicated to thematic discussions aimed at summarizing the symposium results and investigating future research directions. In the following, a presentation of the most promising techniques for radar rainfall QPE is proposed in Section 2 prior to a discussion about some of the challenges of distributed hydrological modelling (Section 3). A set of recommendations is made in Section 4 to foster the use of weather radar in hydrologic sciences. Section 5 briefly introduces the articles of the special issue.