HAS Community Welcomes Peter Troch as New Department Head!
The HAS community welcomes HAS Professor Peter A. Troch as the new Department Head!
Peter transitioned from the HAS professoriate to Department Head and assumed leadership duties from departing Interim Department Head, Chris Castro, on July 1.
In 2005, Peter joined the University of Arizona as Professor of Surface Water Hydrology in the former Department of Hydrology and Water Resources. From 2012 to 2022, he simultaneously served as Science Director at Biosphere 2.
Prior to coming to Tucson, he was Chair of the Hydrology and Quantitative Water Management group of Wageningen University, the Netherlands. Earlier in his career, from 1996 to 1999, he was associate-professor at the Laboratory of Hydrology and Water Management (LHWM) of the University of Gent; and from January to August 1992 he was a scientific researcher at the Water Resources Program of Princeton University. He was involved in several international airborne and space borne remote sensing experiments in hydrology.
Peter served as scientific coordinator for a European Commission 5th FP RTD project on Data assimilation within a unifying modeling framework for improved river basin water resources management (DAUFIN) and organized international workshops on Catchment scale hydrological modeling and data assimilation (CAHMDA), first in September 2001 (Wageningen), then in October 2004 (Princeton), January 2007 (Melbourne), and July 2010 (Lahsa).
His current research involves hillslope to catchment scale hydrological processes, seasonal, decadal and climate predictions of water availability in semi-arid river basins, as well as developing research infrastructure to investigate Critical Zone processes across climate gradients. He is also studying the role of vegetation in catchment-scale hydrological response.
Professionally, he is editor of Water Resources Research and has published over 180 papers in refereed international journals dealing with
- flash flood forecasting
- catchment classification and similarity
- land slide and debris flow modeling
- remote sensing applications in hydrology and data assimilation
- climate variability and climate change impacts on water availability, and the
- role of vegetation on hydrologic partitioning at catchment scales
Peter was awarded the 2011 John Dalton Medal by the European Geophysical Union for "distinguished research in hydrology evaluated as an earth science" and the 2011 Boussinesq Lecturer at the Netherlands Royal Academy of Sciences, Amsterdam. He has been an AGU Fellow since 2015 and was among the inaugural cohort of UArizona Agnese Nelms Haury Chairs in Environment and Social Justice.
We are pleased and gratified that he has taken on this new leadership role. Welcome, Peter!