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This paper highlights mistakes that have helped shape my professional career. I use examples of personal, as well as technical failures to explore some guiding principles that I have found useful when navigating my professional journey. It is only the rarest of technical gurus who can afford to ignore the limitations of their personal interactions: to be impactful, the rest of us need to give as much, if not more, attention to soft skills than we do to our technical ones. I thus discuss the qualities that I think are needed to leverage technical strengths, and I outline some professional behaviours that I think are required to be effective. I also outline some high level technical themes that I have found important as a hydrologist. These cover the challenges of extrapolation, the analysis of joint interactions in compound events, the differentiation between hydrologic change and variability, and the value of separately considering different sources of uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The novel research paradigm, dubbed the “court of miracles of hydrological modelling”, focuses on achieving scientific progress in circumstances which traditionally would be called model failures. Many of the associated modelling issues can be addressed systematically and coherently within the mathematical framework of Bayesian forecast-decision theory. Five of them are addressed herein: (a) choosing a criterion function for making rational decisions under uncertainty (a meta-decision problem); (b) modelling stochastic dependence between variates to quantify uncertainty and predict realizations; (c) fusing data from asymmetric samples to cope with unrepresentativeness of small samples and corruptive effects of outliers; (d) calibrating probabilistic predictions against a prior distribution; and (e) ordering predictors, or models, in terms of their informativeness (equivalently, in terms of their economic value to a decider). It is suggested that communication between hydrologists and deciders (planners, engineers, operators of hydrosystems) would benefit if hydrologists adopted, at least on some issues, the perspective of deciders, who must act in a timely and rational manner, and for whom hydrological estimates and predictions have economic consequences. Citation Krzysztofowicz, R. (2010) Decision criteria, data fusion and prediction calibration: a Bayesian approach. Hydrol. Sci. J. 55(6), 1033-1050. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]