In January, I returned from a wonderful two-month long sabbatical in Japan. Check out my web site (go to my personal homepage) to see some of the photos, including one with former hydro Erik Webb, who gave me some valuable tips on living and travelling in Japan. (I will be returning to Japan in June 2000 for the Western Pacific Geophysics meeting and have persuaded Erik as well as former hydros Charlie Andrews and Chunmiao Zheng to present papers.) I finished my sabbatical mostly in Madison but did manage a trip to Washington, D.C. for a meeting of the Committee on Opportunities in Hydrologic Science, of which I am a member, and another to LaCrosse, WI, for the Wisconsin AWRA meeting and a trip to Boston for the spring AGU meeting where I was very honored to be awarded Fellowship status in AGU. In July, I traveled "down under" for my first trip to Australia where I was a keynote speaker at Water Congress’99 and got some exposure to Australian water issues (as well as the Australian flu).
In August, I took over as department chairman and quickly got deluged by meetings of various sorts. Chatting with lots of former hydros (including Craig Eisen, Bob Sterrett, Bill Woessner, and Todd Rayne) at the alumni reception at GSA in Denver was one of the pleasant sorts of meetings. I taught Transport Modeling during the Fall semester and found that I have too much material for a 1 credit course. Hence, future offerings will be for two credits. Both Wes Dripps and Tim Eaton passed their PhD prelim exams and Yu-Feng Lin (PhD candidate in Geological Engineering) passed the PhD qualifier. Both Wes and Yu-Feng are investigating various aspects of recharge measurement and estimation (a problem I first explored with former hydros Ken Bradbury, Mary Stoertz, and John Faustini), while Tim is researching the hydrogeologic properties of the Maquoketa Shale as part of his work with the WGNHS. Ken Bradbury (WGNHS) is serving on both Wes and Tim’s committees and former hydro Randy Hunt (USGS) is also on Wes’ committee. Wes’ project provided the impetus to broaden our collaboration with the USGS office in Middleton, WI, and allowed Wes to develop a first class monitoring system in the Trout Lake Basin in Northern Wisconsin. In between all of these activities, I worked on a literature review on the use of temperature measurements in hydrogeology, a subject in which I became interested as a result of conversations with Japanese colleagues. All in all it was a varied and extremely busy year.
Chair's Letter - Mary P. Anderson
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