Ignacio Rodríguez Iturbe, US / Venezuelan hydraulic engineer (Caracas 08 March 1942 – 28 September 2022)
Internationally respected as expert on hydraulic climatology
Recognized as the foremost surface water hydrologist in the world
Described tridimensional fundamental structure of hydrographic cuencas and the mechanisms that give rise of them
Formulated one of the first self-similar models to simulate extreme behavior
Introduced Bayesian approaches to estimate parameters of stream flow simulating models and to select models of extremes
Developed the Geomorphological Instantaneous Unit Hydrograph (GIUH) to quantify the discharge of a basin as function of basin geometry and rainfall
First to provide a sound theoretical basis for sampling the rainfall process in space and time
Showed that organization of the basin and resulting landscape patterns are not the result of randomness but process-driven phenomena that can be quantified in terms of well-defined principles
Superheaded the use of point processes and fields to represent precipitation in space and time
Showed that simple nonlinearities in the land-atmosphere dynamics have on patterns of hydrologic variables (i.e. soil moisture)
First to connect the geomorphologic structure of the river basin to its hydrologic response with the theory of geomorphologic unit hydrograph
With A. Rinaldo defined optimal channel networks and First to establish the connection between optimality and fractal growth (1997)
First to provide a sound theoretical basis for the way drainage basins and their networks are arranged (1997)
Developed a simple model for predicting the biodiversity of fish in river networks (2008)
Developed methods to quantify the accuracy and value of hydrologic data
Introduced Bayesian approaches to improve different models for river flows and to predict the likelihood of extreme hydrological events
Showed that nature transports water and sediment out of the watershed in the most energy efficient way possible
Established equations that yielded the drainage pattern that nature will produce under different climatic and geologic conditions
Formulated the mathematical representation of rainfall as random, active point processes
Defined the concept of ecohydrology
Authored 4 papers in Nature and 23 in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences USA
LINKS
https://www.princeton.edu/cee/people/data/i/irodrigu/Bio.pdf