During this year’s pop-up session twelve speakers gave inspiring 5min presentations in which they ‘shared failures, lessons learned and new ideas’, going beyond hour regular conference presentation. Topics ranged from discussing experiences with approaches and ideas that did not work, to innovative ideas in e.g. socio-hydrology and what hydrologists can learn from landslide research.

One of the highlights was a presentation by Natalie Ceperly et al., who shared their difficulties in modeling a fairly simple well-measured catchment in the Alps. Their data is good and their models generally work very well, but for some unkown mysterical reason they are not able to get the model working for two specific years. They’re still looking for an answer and if you have one feel free to contact them.

Another presentation that might got you thinking was by Christopher Hutton, on reproducibility of hydrological modeling results. We, researchers, tend to keep our models, codes and even data to ourselves, and only present the final results. But how do we know whether those results are even real? How can we check another’s research? And how can we make sure that experiments can be repeated?

Summarizing, a lot of food for thought. We aim to organize this session again next year, and preferably even split up in a session (1) focusing solely on sharing failures, and (2) focusing on new ideas, innovative techniques, and inspiring discussions tat will get you thinking.

Contact us if you’re interested in (co-)organizing.