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Dr. Murugesu Sivapalan

Adjunct Research Professor

  • B. Sc. Eng. (Hons), 1975. University of Ceylon, Sri Lanka M. Eng., 1977. Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand. M. A., 1983, Princeton University, U. S. A. Ph.D., 1986. Princeton University, U. S. A. Doctor Honoris Causa, 2012. Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
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Research Interests

Sivapalan’s research is aimed at advancing hydrologic predictions (i.e., streamflow, including extremes, and stream water quality), at catchment scale through overcoming three major challenges to extrapolation: (i) across space (i.e., from small to large space scales); (ii) across places (i.e., across regional gradients of climate and topography); and (iii) across time (e.g., in changing physical and/or social environments).

With these in mind, the thrust of Siva’s fundamental research is to gain understanding of observed space-time variability of rainfall-streamflow-water quality processes, including extremes, at a range of time and space scales, and across places (i.e., across climatic, topographic and socio-economic gradients, both regionally and globally), and interpret these in terms of underlying climate-soil-vegetation-topography-human interactions and feedbacks.

Advances in hydrological understanding are then used to develop hydrological models, both top-down and bottom-up, that can be used to make predictions of water quantity and water quality at the catchment scale, regionally across places, and in the future under human-induced climatic and land use and land cover changes and other human interferences in the hydrologic cycle.

Biography

Sivapalan was born in Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka. He obtained his undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering at the University of Ceylon (now Peradeniya) in 1975. He later received the M.Eng degree in water resources engineering from the Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok, Thailand. He then worked as a consultant civil engineer for three years in Ibadan, Nigeria. Subsequently, he went to Princeton University, New Jersey, and obtained the MA (1983) and PhD (1986) degrees in civil engineering, with a specialization in hydrology. After his PhD Professor Sivapalan joined the University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia in 1988 as a Lecturer, eventually getting promoted to full Professor of Environmental Engineering in 1999. In 2005 joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a Professor Civil and Environmental Engineering and Professor of Geography and Geographic Information Science.

In 2012, Sivapalan was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the Delft University of Technology for lifelong contributions to the science and practice of hydrology. In 2015 he was made the Chester and Helen Siess Endowed Professor at UIUC.

Sivapalan has also served as Visiting Professor at Vienna University of Technology and Delft University of Technology and as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia and at Tsinghua University, China. He held the Satish Dhawan Visiting Chair Professorship at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, and currently serves as Honorary Professor at Tsinghua University.  

Activities

As part of his work on scale issues in hydrology, Sivapalan organized successful workshops on scale issues, including the one in Robertson, Australia in 1993 and in Krumbach, Austria, in 1996, both of which had a major impact on the field. His review paper with Günter Blöschl on scale issues in hydrological modeling has now become a classic.

Sivapalan was founding chair of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences’  Decade on Predictions in Ungauged Basins (PUB) initiative, through which he mobilized the international community at the grassroots level to undertake fundamental research addressing this major scientific challenge in catchment hydrology. The culmination of PUB was publication of the synthesis book Runoff Predictions in Ungauged Basins (Blöschl et al., 2013) by Cambridge University Press, in which Sivapalan served as an editor.

Recognizing the role of humans in hydrology, Sivapalan founded the subdiscipline of socio-hydrology in 2012. The launch of socio-hydrology coincided with the launch of the Panta Rhei: Change in Hydrology and Society, another global, decadal (2013–22) initiative of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences in which once again Sivapalan played a leading role. Sivapalan traveled around the world, establishing international collaborations in Australia, China, and Europe, and promoting socio-hydrologic thinking. For his contributions to socio-hydrology and his leadership in promoting the field around the world he was awarded the Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water (PSIPW) (Creativity Prize).

Sivapalan has served at various times on the editorial boards of almost all international hydrology journals, including Hydrological Processes, Hydrological Sciences Journal, Advances in Water Resources, Journal of Hydrology and Water Resources Research. He was executive editor of the European Geosciences Union’s Hydrology and Earth System Sciences Journal, following its transition to open access.

Publications

Sivapalan has published more than 300 peer-reviewed papers and several research monographs. His publications are highly cited: for example, over 40,000 citations with an H-index of 100 in Google Scholar (over 25,000 citations and H=80 in Web of Science). His publications cover a wide range of topics, including the effects of heterogeneity, scale, flood frequency, water balance, water quality modeling, and socio-hydrology. The most cited articles include research on scale issues in hydrological modeling with prediction in ungauged basins and socio-hydrology.

Awards & Honours

Sivapalan’s research contributions have been recognized through multiple awards from national and international scientific organizations and academies. These include:

In honor of Sivapalan’s contributions to the development of hydrologic science the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) established the Sivapalan Young Scientists Travel Award (SYSTA) in 2018.

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