Writing a scientific book

Hydrometeorology: Forecasting and Applications

For this latest post, I thought I’d do something slightly different and provide some insights into researching and writing a scientific book. This is to celebrate publication of the latest (third) edition of ‘Hydrometeorology: Forecasting and Applications’ by Springer this month.

A moment last week familiar to most writers - opening the freshly delivered box of author copies for a first ever view of the printed version

The first edition appeared in 2010 and the underlying theme remains the same, which is to give practical insights into how meteorological observations and forecasts are used in water-related applications. That includes flood and drought early warnings, reservoir and tidal barrier operations, beach water quality and harmful algal bloom alerts, and estimating climate change impacts on water supply. I’ve included the ‘blurb’ from the back cover at the end of this post if you are interested to know more.

Before starting a book, I find an extended period of reflection useful, jotting down ideas, doing background reading on the latest research, and deciding who you’re going to contact for more insights. I’ve looked into more sophisticated ways of organizing all this information over the years, such as Evernote, OneNote and Scrivener, but find that a spreadsheet does most of what I need, with separate tabs to summarise word counts, detailed contents lists, a to do list, figures and tables, permissions etc. Also, individual file folders and Word documents for each main section for notes, documents etc. to work through and a steady supply of post-it notes to jot down writing plans for the day, week and month ahead.

Only then do I start writing, usually working on a chapter at a time rather than jumping around between topics, but jotting down ideas relevant to other chapters as they occur. In the early stages, the flow and logic of the text is more important than the content - writing mainly from memory - as you can flesh this out later; indeed, many iterations later a detailed line-by-line factcheck is an essential if time-consuming final step. In the early days, it was tempting to draft the easiest bits first but I now find a head-on approach works best, starting with the introduction to a chapter before continuing on to the rest. If the writing doesn’t flow, that often means that more research and preparation is required, for me at least.

Research of course is a major task, not just for recent developments but for things that you think you know well from having worked on them for many years; in fact, these ‘known knowns’ merit extra checking as it’s so easy to lose sight of the original assumptions and ideas behind them.

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — there are things we do not know we don’t know. From a now (in)famous quote by Donald Rumsfeld in 2002, mentioned surprisingly often at scientific meetings about uncertainty estimation.

A digital bathing water quality sign at a local beach in Scotland last year; the hydrometeorological science behind these messages made an interesting case study for the book (with thanks to SEPA)

When I wrote my first book¹, I remember wading through box-after-box of documents containing useful items I’d collected over the years for use on projects and in research. However, I’m pleased to say that most of these are all now long gone with just a few items kept for nostalgic reasons and anything else useful scanned before disposal.

Which brings me to another major change since that time, which is the transformation in the amount of publicly available information online. That includes not just scientific papers but so-called grey literature of which I’m a big fan, such as strategy documents, technical reports, white papers, operational guidelines and brochures from instrument manufacturers and consulting engineers. For example, strategies are incredibly useful in seeing what organisations are actually planning to invest in over the next few years, helping to make sense of the sometimes overwhelming number of ideas suggested in the research literature.

Scribbled notes from trips away and discussions with experts are vital too and I’ll often type them up in an email to myself while it’s fresh in my mind. Nowadays - copyright permitting – I digitise everything first to avoid having to jump between printed pages and the screen when writing, so regular backups are essential too!

River flow monitoring is another topic in the book and these photographs from field trips didn’t quite make the cut, with better versions available. On the left, flow monitoring in an irrigation canal in Somalia drew us a crowd of onlookers while, on the right, this was taken while we were running a practical session for engineers in Sri Lanka on flow measurement techniques using Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) and current meter equipment, plus a simpler float-based technique for comparison

Despite these advances, libraries still have an essential role to play and there’s nothing like browsing through shelves of books and reports on a particular topic to learn more about a subject and finding documents you wouldn’t in any other way. In addition to scientific libraries, two I’ve particularly enjoyed visiting over the years were the British Library’s fabulous headquarters in London and their main storage facility in west Yorkshire, which is notable for its extraordinary scale - if you publish books in the UK, one of the legal deposit versions you provide is probably there.

Direct measurements of evaporation are another topic in the book and this is a photo from one of the most enjoyable projects I’ve worked on, measuring evaporation from a tropical lake in Sumatra using automatic weather station and eddy covariance equipment

The end point of all this is of course a book, and it never fails to amaze me how all the long hours of effort can be condensed into a single document you can hold in your hand or read as an ebook. I imagine that other authors feel the same; read on for the ‘blurb’ that I mentioned.

¹ Sene K (2008) Flood warning, forecasting and emergency response, Springer, Dordrecht

The back cover description

Hydrometeorology: Forecasting and Applications is the latest edition of this award-winning book intended for practicing engineers and scientists. It also provides useful background for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in engineering, earth sciences, environmental sciences, geography, meteorology and hydrology.

Operational examples include applications from the USA, UK, the Netherlands, Bangladesh and Nepal. Throughout, there is a focus on end-to-end warning systems, forecast uncertainty and risk-based and impact-based approaches. Hydrological forecasting topics include rainfall-runoff, flow routing, data assimilation, forecast verification and ensemble techniques. There are also updates to the text on weather radar, satellite precipitation estimates, hydrometry, low cost monitoring, numerical weather prediction, demand forecasting and dissemination of warnings, including the role of social media and citizen science.

Applications include national and community based flood warning systems, flash flood guidance, famine and drought early warning systems, reservoir operations, and surface water, debris flow, ice jam, bathing water and harmful algal bloom alerts. Seasonal forecasting, land surface and global hydrological models are now discussed in more detail, including the opportunities from ‘Big Data’ and artificial intelligence, and a new chapter discusses approaches to predicting the hydrological impacts of climate change. The extensive sets of references have been revised and updated.

Further reading

Sene K (2024) Hydrometeorology: Forecasting and Applications, 3rd edition, Springer Nature, Cham, Switzerland, 516pp

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-58269-1?sap-outbound-id=DD74F472095746DA2951D1ED6FBC721E687905E1