HAS Professor and Department Head Peter Troch Named As A 2026 Rieke Prize Honoree
You can read the original College of Science article here.
Congratulations to HAS Professor and Department Head Peter A. Troch who was recently named one of the College of Science Rieke Prize Honorees for 2026!
The Marcia and George Rieke Prize recognizes and rewards excellence in research demonstrated by faculty members in the College of Science. The Awardee and two Honorees will be recognized at the Galileo Circle Dinner on April 16, 2026, and one of the Honorees is our very own Dr. Peter Troch, Professor and Head, Department of Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences.
Peter is being honored for his contributions to the observations, modeling, and understanding of hydrological processes in the Earth system. He first developed the theory of subsurface flow at the hillslope scale (i.e., tens to hundreds of meters) in the 1990s based on the Boussinesq equation and used this to explore the role of topographic attributes on subsurface flow, by developing a dimensionless similarity framework that characterizes the role of topography. His team was the first to use active microwave observations from satellites to estimate soil moisture profiles in the vegetation root zone (i.e., top soil layer of ~0.5 – 4 m depth) using data assimilation, a process of combining a land model with observations to create a more accurate and consistent estimate of the system’s state. His most recent efforts have focused on fundamental insights into how catchments come into being in the first place (how they co-evolve with climate, geology and time), leading to comparative analyses and modeling of several hundred catchments around the U.S. and viewing them as examples of the legacies of past co-evolution.
Peter received the John Dalton Medal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) in 2011, the highest honor for hydrologists in Europe. He was elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in 2015 and gave the prestigious Boussinesq Lecture at the Netherlands Royal Academy of Sciences in 2011. At the University of Arizona, Peter was named a Galileo Circle Fellow from the College of Science in 2012 and an Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice in 2015.