Professor Andrew Binley

Research Interests

Andrew completed a PhD in modelling unsaturated flow in heterogeneous porous media in 1986 and then worked with Keith Beven at Lancaster on the development of tools for the estimation and reduction of uncertainty in hydrological models. This work led to the Generalised Likelihood Uncertainty Estimation (GLUE) methodology.

Andrew obtained a lectureship in groundwater hydrology at Lancaster in 1989. He continued work on model calibration and prediction prompted him to start work in the early 1990s on constraining hydrological models with geophysical data. He has developed new tools for this work (e.g. for inversion of electrical resistivity tomography data) and new approaches for the fusion of hydrological and geophysical data. He has been an active contributor to the field of hydrogeophysics, which has emerged over the past two decades. In 1997 Andrew became Senior Lecturer and in 2004 he was awarded a Personal Chair.

Andrew’s research areas include: (1) groundwater-surface water interaction; (2) fusion (assimilation) of hydrological and geophysical data for improved hydrological characterisation; (3) inverse methods in geophysics; (4) electrical spectroscopy of hydrogeological materials; (5) plant-soil-water exchanges.

He is currently Associate Editor for Water Resources Research and Vadose Zone Journal. He has served as Associate Editor for Journal of Hydrology and Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology and Hydrogeology. Between 2003 and 2006 Andrew was Deputy Chair of the American Geophysical Union Hydrogeophysics Committee. Between 2006 and 2008 he served as Chair of this committee.

He is currently a member of the Wyoming Center for Environmental Hydrology and Geophysics External Advisory Committee (2012 - ), member of the Advisory Board of HOBE Center for Hydrology, Denmark (2007 - ) and Committee member, Near Surface Geophysics Group, Geol. Soc. (2001 -). He is a past member of the NERC and EPSRC Peer Review panels. Between 2015 and 2017 he served as chair on NERC Discovery Science grant panels.

In 2012 he was awarded the Frank Frischknecht Leadership Award for his long-term contributions to the field of near-surface geophysics, and in particular hydrogeophysics. This award is jointly presented by the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) and the Environmental and Engineering Geophysical Society (EEGS).

In 2013 he was elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), with the citation:“For outstanding contributions toward the fundamental understanding of hydrological model uncertainty and for pioneering the field of hydrogeophysics”