30 September - 3 October 2023. Dakar, Senegal

organised by the IAHR/WMO/IAHS Working Group on Hydrometry Training Course. The course is designed for students and professional hydrologists who want to gain a clear picture of hydrometry and get involved in the international community of hydrometry experts.

Stephanie Moore (ECCC, Canada), Bienvenu Dinga (IRSEN, Congo) and Jérôme Le Coz (INRAE, France) were the main three instructors at the hydrometry course in Dakar, Senegal, with presentations from Ernest Amoussou (FRIEND AOC, Benin) and Bakary Faty (DGPRE, Senegal).

This training was aimed at graduate students and professionals in hydrology and hydrometry. Thirty students attended the 4-day course, including the entire hydrometric monitoring team from Senegal's Direction de la Gestion et de la Planification des Ressources en Eau and students and professionals from Sénégal, Bénin, Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire, Comores, and Nigeria (via Canada). Students learned the basics of water level and flow monitoring. Emphasis was placed on no-cost and low-cost methods and software, such as the transparent velocity-head rod, surface velocity imagery, and rating curve development and data processing tools such as BaRatinAGE and well as free database management tools such as Hydraccess.

The course was organized by Abdoulaye Faty and Waly Faye at Université Cheikh Anta Diop (UCAD)'s Ecole Doctorale Eau, Qualité et Usages de l'Eau in partnership with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research (IAHR) and the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS). It was associated with the UNESCO's 9th FRIEND-Water Global Conference.

With a mix of data producers and data users, the exchanges about the need for quality water level and flow data were vibrant. Equally so were the discussions around the need for free and open-source software for data processing and data delivery, and the need to provide uncertainty estimates with each data point.

Since 2011, the international IAHR/WMO/IAHS training course on stream gauging has been organized in six countries around the world by recognized hydrometry experts. The three-day course consists of lectures covering topics including field operations (gauging station, discharge measurements), data management (rating curves, uncertainty estimation, data review) and field exercises. The course is designed for students, academics and professional hydrologists who want to gain a clear picture of both classic and innovative hydrometry technologies, and get involved in the international community of hydrometry experts.

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