Keith Beven

Keith John Beven FRS (born 23 July 1950) is a British hydrologist who is currently Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Hydrology at Lancaster University. He is the most highly cited hydrologist.

He graduated with a BSc in Geography from the University of Bristol in 1971 and completed his PhD at the University of East Anglia in 1975. He worked at the University of Leeds (1974-1977) and the Institute of Hydrology, Wallingford (1977-1979 and 1982-1985). He was an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia from 1979 to 1982 and joined Lancaster University in 1985. He has held visiting positions at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1996) and EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland (1997); K.U. Leuven, Belgium (1999-2000) and Uppsala University/SLU Uppsala, Sweden as Konung Carl XVI Gustafs Gästprofessor i Miljövetenskap in 2006-2007.

His main research interests are in hydrological modelling and understanding the prediction uncertainties associated with environmental models. He was the originator with Mike Kirkby of the TOPMODEL Concepts and the originator of the Generalised Likelihood Uncertainty Estimation (GLUE) methodology. GLUE has been applied to a wide variety of fields including rainfall-runoff modelling, flood inundation, water quality modelling, sediment transport, recharge and groundwater modelling, vegetation growth models, aphid populations, forest fire and tree death modelling. He is working on novel modelling of flow and transport on hillslopes and in catchments, modelling the impacts of climate and land management on flood runoff and flood frequency, nonparametric estimation of the rainfall-flow nonlinearity, and flood forecasting. He has published 10 books and over 350 papers.

• Fellow of the Royal Society (2017, the first hydrologist elected since Sir Charles Pereira in 1969)
• Foreign member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (2017)
• Horton Award of the American Geophysical Union (1991)
• Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (1995)
• John Dalton Medal of the European Geophysical Society (2001)
• Linnaeus Lecture Award at Uppsala University (2002)
• Langbein Lecture Award of the American Geophysical Union (2004)
• King Carl XVI Gustaf Professorship in Environmental Science (2006)
• IAHS/WMO/UNESCO International Hydrology Prize (2009)
• Robert E. Horton Medal of the American Geophysical Union (2012)
• President's Prize of the British Hydrological Society (2013)
• Honorary DSc, University of Bristol (2015)

K.J. Beven and P. Carling (Eds.), 1989, Floods : hydrological sedimentological and geomorphological implications. Wiley, Chichester (ISBN 0-471-92164-5).

K.J. Beven and I.D. Moore (Eds.), 1992, Terrain Analysis and Distributed Modelling in Hydrology, Wiley, Chichester (ISBN 0-471-93886-6)

K.J. Beven and M.J. Kirkby (Eds.), 1993, Channel Network Hydrology, Wiley, Chichester. (ISBN 0-471-93534-4)

K.J. Beven, P.C. Chatwin and J.H. Millbank (Eds.), 1994, Mixing and Transport in the Environment, Wiley, Chichester. (ISBN 0-471-94142-5)

K. J. Beven, (Ed.), 1997, Distributed Modelling in Hydrology: Applications of TOPMODEL, Wiley, Chichester. (ISBN 0-471-97724-1)

K. J. Beven, 2001, Rainfall-Runoff Modelling : The Primer, Wiley, Chichester (ISBN Hb: 0-471-98553-8; Pb: 0-470-86671-3, 2003)

K. J. Beven, 2006, Benchmark papers in Streamflow Generation Processes, IAHS Press, Wallingford, UK (with selection, introduction and commentaries on papers) (ISBN 1-901502-53-8) http://www.cig.ensmp.fr/~iahs/

K. J. Beven, 2006, Rainfall-Runoff Modelling: The Primer (Chinese edition, ISBN 7-5084-4184-2)

K. J. Beven, 2009, Environmental Modelling: An Uncertain Future? Routledge: London (ISBN Hb: 978-0-415-46302-7; Pb: 978-0-415-45759-0) http://www.uncertain-future.org.uk

E.M. Shaw, K. J. Beven, N. A. Chappell and R. Lamb, 2010, Hydrology in Practice, 4th Edition, Spon: London. (ISBN Hb: 978-0-415-37041-7, Pb: 978-0-415-37042-4, ebk: 978-0-203-03023-3)

K J Beven, 2011, Mallerstang Magic: Images of the Mallerstang Valley, Blurb Books, 36pp small format or large format

K J Beven, 2012, Mallerstang in Panorama: Panoramic Images of the Mallerstang Valley, Blurb Books, 42pp small format or large format

K J Beven, 2012, Mallerstang in Mono: Black and White Images of the Mallerstang Valley, Blurb Books, 50pp small format or large format

K. J. Beven, 2012, Rainfall-Runoff Modelling: The Primer (2nd Edition), Wiley-Blackwell: Chichester, UK. ISBN 978-0-470-71459-1

K. J. Beven and J. W. Hall (Eds.), 2014, Applied Uncertainty Estimation in Flood Risk Management, Imperial College Press: London.