Keith John Beven (born 23 July 1950) is a British hydrologist and distinguished emeritus professor in hydrology at Lancaster University. According to Lancaster University he is the most highly cited hydrologist.
In 2017, Beven was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to the understanding of hydrological processes and development of the foundations of modern hydrological modeling.
Education
Beven was educated at Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar School, graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in geography from the University of Bristol in 1971 and was awarded a PhD from the University of East Anglia (UEA) in 1975 for research on catchment hydrology supervised by Keith Clayton.
Career and research
Beven 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 École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland (1997); KU Leuven, Belgium (1999–2000) and Uppsala University and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (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 peer reviewed papers.
Awards and honours
Beven has received several awards and honours including:
Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2017, the first hydrologist elected since Charles Pereira in 1969 Foreign member of the US 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) International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS)/World Meteorological Organization (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)