Prof. Eng. EzioTodini

In his long career first as a researcher and then as a University Professor, Prof. EzioTodini has contributed to the advancement of knowledge in the field of Hydrological Sciences, persistently seeking to transfer research results into hydrological practice, promoting synergies between the Scientific Community, Public Administration, the Professional World and Business. He has developed theoretical and modeling contributions that have high national and international relevance, providing operational tools for real-time flood forecasting and water resources management in numerous contexts of civil protection and resource management activities.

From an academic point of view, his innovative teaching and research contributions have made it possible to transcend the traditional method of framing Hydrology as the science for design wave determination. His long university experience has enabled the formation of a large class of engineers, many of whom are now university professors, who have become aware of the important role of Hydrology not only in the field of Engineering but also Earth Sciences.

In the study of flood formation processes, he has carried out a long research path moving from the realization in the 1970s of original input-output models such as the Constrained Linear Systems (CLS) to conceptual models such as the ARNO model in the 1980s and concluding with physically based distributed models such as TOPKAPI in the early years of the new millennium. In the field of flood propagation, he created the Parabolic And Backwater (PAB) model, which initiated interesting research developments at the Federico II University of Naples. He also contributed to mass conservatism of the Muskingum-Cunge approach. Since the 1970s he has studied Kalman Filters for state and parameter estimation. There he devised a dual filter, the Mutually Interactive State Parameter estimation (MISP), which allows alternating state and parameter conditional estimates in a form closely resembling the more recent Gibbs Sampler. MISP in the 2000s has since been used in other areas and regarded as the best online approach for voice filtering. In recent years he has successfully developed the study of predictive uncertainty by proposing the Model Conditional Processor (MCP) approach, which has recently enabled interesting developments with multi-model and multi-time probabilistic predictions.Author of more than 200 papers in hydrology and hydraulics, among which 130 are registered in the ISI SCOPUS database. His work is highly recognized by the scientific community as evidenced by 3160 citations and an h-index of 30. He recently contributed to the book Applied Hydrology with two chapters on predictive uncertainty and parameter estimation. In 2012 he was terned the Stockholm Prize, the Nobel Prize of water-related research. He has served for decades as Editor and Associate Editor of leading journals in the field of Hydrology. Due to his high scientific stature and experience in the field of Hydrological Sciences, he has also served as a consultant to many international bodies such as the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and more recently working with the World Bank (WB). Additionally, he directly  participated in the implementation of a large number of real-time flood forecasting systems in Italy, China and Spain on basins ranging from the Po to the Tiber, the Duero to the Tagus, the Fuchun to the Yellow River. Finally, he should be credited with having conceived, promoted, and supported with great conviction the need to find a common home for Italian hydrologists, which took concrete form in September 2009 with the founding of the Italian Hydrological Society, of which he was Founding President, a presidency he held for two terms, until December 2016. The reasons given, although synthetic, are an expression of Prof. Ezio Todini’s high scientific quality in the field of Hydrological Sciences, making him a full-fledged Honorary President of the Italian Hydrological Society.