International Hydrological Sciences Training from UCAR's COMET Program

The COMET Program at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) has been producing training and educational tools in meteorology, hydrology, climate science, and other natural sciences for more than 25 years. As of 2016 the COMET MetEd website has over 13,000 active registrants, including registrants from more than 1900 universities, 190 nations, and major agencies such as the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the National Water Academy (NWA) India, the Institute for Meteorological Training and Research (IMTR) Kenya, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) United States. There are over 800 hours of self-paced, online training. Please access this training at https://www.meted.ucar.edu/. Registration is free.

Beginning in 2011, the COMET Program partnered with the WMO and other agencies to deliver facilitated online courses in basic and advanced hydrologic sciences. In 2011, COMET hosted a Train the Trainer course to prepare instructors from various WMO Regional Training Centers to develop and facilitate online courses centered around the use of COMET’s MetEd lessons, with the possibility of including their own material, if particularly suited to their specific region . Several of the participants have gone on to offer national and regional hydrologic science courses in collaboration with the WMO and COMET.  

Through 2016 the Basic Hydrologic Sciences course has been delivered once at the global level, once to each WMO Region V (Southwest Pacific) and Region VI (Europe), and multiple times to Region I (Africa) and Region II (Asia). The course is designed to meet the needs of environmental forecasters who do not have formal training in hydrology, but who work with hydrologic data, particularly in flood forecasting. This 6-week  course is intended to provide an understanding of ground, surface, and atmospheric forms of water, and will prepare the student for further study in hydrologic methods and forecasting. Each attendee must complete 10-12 lessons and a written assignment on hydrologic topics relevant to their local region. Discussion forums are designed to answer questions and enhance the attendee’s learning experience. Discussions are moderated by experts from the local region along with experts at UCAR.

In addition to the basic course, the NWA, the COMET Program, and the WMO have collaborated to deliver Advanced Topics in Hydraulics, Hydrological Sciences, and Hydrometeorology, a more advanced online course to Region II in both 2015 and 2016. This 6-8 week course is designed to meet the needs of hydrological forecasters who require more advanced training in selected hydraulic and hydrological modeling topics. This course is especially for the participants that have successfully completed the basic course or who have requisite knowledge on the subject. As with the basic course, it is a moderated course where attendees are required to successfully complete quizzes for a series of online lessons and complete a written assignment from one of three possible topic areas.

For anyone interested in the core material used in the Basic Hydrologic Science Course, it can be accessed on the MetEd website: Basic Hydrologic Sciences: International Edition (https://www.meted.ucar.edu/training_course.php?id=24).  The advanced course uses various lessons, such as Distributed Hydrologic Models for Flow Forecasts - Part 1 (https://www.meted.ucar.edu/training_module.php?id=545), Dams and Dam Failure - Module 1: Terminology and Open Channel Hydraulics (https://www.meted.ucar.edu/training_module.php?id=469), Climate Variability and Change for Water Resources Management - International Edition (https://www.meted.ucar.edu/training_module.php?id=1184), and several other lessons.