This paper is the outcome of a community initiative to identify major unsolved scientific problems in hydrology motivated by a need for stronger harmonisation of research efforts. The procedure involved a public consultation through online media, followed by two workshops through which a large number of potential science questions were collated, prioritised, and synthesised. In spite of the diversity of the participants (230 scientists in total), the process revealed much about community priorities and the state of our science: a preference for continuity in research questions rather than radical departures or redirections from past and current work. Questions remain focused on the process-based understanding of hydrological variability and causality at all space and time scales. Increased attention to environmental change drives a new emphasis on understanding how change propagates across interfaces within the hydrological system and across disciplinary boundaries. In particular, the expansion of the human footprint raises a new set of questions related to human interactions with nature and water cycle feedbacks in the context of complex water management problems. We hope that this reflection and synthesis of the 23 unsolved problems in hydrology will help guide research efforts for some years to come. ARTICLE HISTORY

Abstract. Soil water content and matric potential are central hydrological state variables. A large variety of automated probes and sensor systems for state monitoring exist and are frequently applied. Most applications solely rely on the calibration by the manufacturers. Until now, there has been no commonly agreed-upon calibration procedure. Moreover, several opinions about the capabilities and reliabilities of specific sensing methods or sensor systems exist and compete. A consortium of several institutions conducted a comparison study of currently available sensor systems for soil water content and matric potential under field conditions. All probes were installed at 0.2 m b.s. (metres below surface), following best-practice procedures. We present the set-up and the recorded data of 58 probes of 15 different systems measuring soil moisture and 50 further probes of 14 different systems for matric potential. We briefly discuss the limited coherence of the measurements in a cross-correlation analysis. The measuring campaign was conducted during the growing period of 2016. The monitoring data, results from pedophysical analyses of the soil and laboratory reference measurements for calibration are published in Jackisch et al. (2018, https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.892319).

Artificial drainage is successfully used to improve the moisture conditions of agricultural soils, but there are drawbacks, such as nutrient export and wetland destruction. This Special Section: Artificial Drainage of the Vadose Zone Journal features eight papers comprising diverse subjects, including the history of land drainage in England, monitoring strategies, nutrient losses under different management systems, and constructed wetlands to mitigate pollution from tile drainage. Still, there are issues such as catchment‐scale management approaches or the influence of drainage management measures on carbon cycling upon which scientists will have to work in the 21st century.

Copper is an important micronutrient and trace amounts are essential for crop growth. However, high concentrations of copper will produce toxic effects. Australia is increasingly developing production of crops in water repellent soils. Clay amendment, a common amelioration techniques used in Australia, has demonstrated agronomic benefits in increased crop or pasture production. The sorption and desorption of copper and the effect of clay treatment on copper behaviour in a water repellent soil collected from an experimental farm in South Australia is studied. We found that the water repellent soils amended with clay have an increased adsorption capacity of copper. Also the clay-amended soils had an increased ratio of specific sorption to total sorption of copper. The implications of this study to the sustainable agro-environmental management of water repellent soils is discussed.

Henry Darcy was an engineer who built the drinking water supply system of the French city of Dijon in the mid-19th century. In doing so, he developed an interest in the flow of water through sands, and, together with Charles Ritter, he experimented (in a hospital, for unclear reasons) with water flow in a vertical cylinder filled with different sands to determine the laws of flow of water through sand. The results were published in an appendix to Darcy’s report on his work on Dijon’s water supply. Darcy and Ritter installed mercury manometers at the bottom and near the top of the cylinder, and they observed that the water flux density through the sand was proportional to the difference between the mercury levels. After mercury levels are converted to equivalent water levels and recast in differential form, this relationship is known as Darcy’s Law, and until this day it is the cornerstone of the theory of water flow in porous media. The development of groundwater hydrology and soil water hydrology that originated with Darcy’s Law is tracked through seminal contributions over the past 160 years. Darcy’s Law was quickly adopted for calculating groundwater flow, which blossomed after the introduction of a few very useful simplifying assumptions that permitted a host of analytical solutions to groundwater problems, including flows toward pumped drinking water wells and toward drain tubes. Computers have made possible ever more advanced numerical solutions based on Darcy’s Law, which have allowed tailor-made computations for specific areas. In soil hydrology, Darcy’s Law itself required modification to facilitate its application for different soil water contents. The understanding of the relationship between the potential energy of soil water and the soil water content emerged early in the 20th century. The mathematical formalization of the consequences for the flow rate and storage change of soil water was established in the 1930s, but only after the 1970s did computers become powerful enough to tackle unsaturated flows head-on. In combination with crop growth models, this allowed Darcy-based models to aid in the setup of irrigation practices and to optimize drainage designs. In the past decades, spatial variation of the hydraulic properties of aquifers and soils has been shown to affect the transfer of solutes from soils to groundwater and from groundwater to surface water. More recently, regional and continental-scale hydrology have been required to quantify the role of the terrestrial hydrological cycle in relation to climate change. Both developments may pose new areas of application, or show the limits of applicability, of a law derived from a few experiments on a cylinder filled with sand in the 1850s.