The Rafael Bras Symposium at the 106th AMS Annual Meeting will honor the distinguished 50+-year career of Rafael L. Bras (pictured at right), currently Regents Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The symposium celebrates recent advances and explores future directions in areas of hydrological science where Bras has made seminal contributions, including hydrometeorology, hydroclimatology, ecohydrology, and geomorphology.
The Bras Symposium will be held Wednesday, January 28, at AMS 2026 in Houston and online. View the program here.
We spoke with symposium cochair Guiling Wang to learn more about what attendees can expect.
“Rafael has consistently pushed the frontiers of hydrology … his work revealed deep connections between water, land, and atmosphere, providing insight into the resilience and vulnerability of coupled natural–human systems.”
Symposium Cochair Guiling Wang
Why is now an important time to honor Rafael Bras’s work?
“Water is life.” Many developmental challenges are centered around water, whether it is too much, too little, or too dirty. The science of water is vital for addressing major societal challenges such as water resources engineering and management.
From research to forecasts to decision-making, from fundamental theories and numerical modeling to deep learning and AI, this symposium is organized in Rafael’s honor to celebrate recent advances and explore future directions in broad fields of Earth science.
What can attendees expect from the Symposium? What issues will be discussed?
The sessions are packed with invited talks from leading scientists and practitioners who will share their experience and/or visions for the future of hydrology.
AI and quantum computing are accelerating discoveries and understanding of fundamental processes and mechanisms that guide environmental solutions to water resources engineering and management problems. The related cutting-edge issues will be part of the discussion.
What makes Rafael Bras’s career so noteworthy?
Rafael is a world-renowned hydrologist, educator, and academic leader whose influence has shaped the direction of hydrological science for more than five decades. His seminal book, Random Functions in Hydrology (with Ignacio Rodríguez-Iturbe), introduced a rigorous probabilistic framework that transformed how hydrologists understand and use variability, uncertainty, and scale, and launched stochastic hydrology as a discipline, and it remains a cornerstone of hydrologic science today. Beyond this landmark, Rafael has consistently pushed the frontiers of hydrology. He advanced the coupling of hydrology with meteorology, demonstrated the chaotic and structured nature of rainfall, brought quantitative rigor to fluvial geomorphology, and pioneered the use of digital elevation models to uncover the organization of river basins. In ecohydrology and hydroclimatology, his work revealed deep connections between water, land, and atmosphere, providing insight into the resilience and vulnerability of coupled natural–human systems.
With this symposium, we celebrate not only Rafael’s past accomplishments but also the ongoing vitality of the ideas he helped to establish that continue to guide us in solving present and future problems facing sustainable development and human survival.
