Hydrology faces critical challenges in reproducibility, accessibility and collaboration, limiting progress and innovation. This article introduces ‘ moving research down the academic career scale’ ( MRDTACS ): the idea that work should be reproducible by someone at an earlier career stage and in less time than the original work. We advocate for research tools and methods to be accessible to students and early career researchers. By embedding open and findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable (FAIR) principles,…

Abstract. As the spatial coverage of evaporation observations is limited, we propose a novel, opportunistic method to estimate evaporation in which we consider commercial microwave links (CMLs), such as used in cellular telecommunication networks, in combination with scintillometry. Scintillometers are dedicated instruments to measure path-integrated latent and sensible heat fluxes, transmitting electromagnetic radiation that is diffracted by turbulent eddies between transmitter and receiver, causing the so-called…

Abstract. Scintillometers are used to estimate path-integrated evaporation and sensible heat fluxes. Commercial microwave links (CMLs), such as are used in cellular telecommunication networks, are similar line-of-sight instruments that also measure signal intensity of microwave signals, just like microwave scintillometers do. However, CMLs are not designed to capture scintillation fluctuations. Here, we investigate if and under what conditions CMLs can be used to obtain the structure parameter of the refractive in…

Hydrology faces critical challenges in reproducibility, accessibility, and collaboration, limiting progress and innovation. We introduce “Moving Research Down the Academic Career Scale” (MRDACS): the idea that work should be reproducible by someone at an earlier career stage and in less time than the original work. We advocate for research tools and methods to be accessible to students and early-career researchers. By embedding Open and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) princ…

Abstract. Scintillometers are used to measure path-integrated evaporation and sensible heat fluxes. They consist of a transmitter and a receiver separated along a line of sight of several hundreds of meters to a few kilometers. Turbulent eddies and the associated refractive index fluctuations along the path between transmitter and receiver cause diffraction of the transmitted beam, known as the scintillation effect. Optical and microwave scintillometers have been designed to measure the full spectral range of the …