JEDDAH: The winners of the eighth edition of the Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz International Prize for Water received their awards during a recent ceremony at the UN headquarters in New York.
The competition is held under the patronage of Saudi Arabia’s King Salman.
Abdulrahman bin Abdulmohsen Al-Fadhli, the Saudi minister of water, environment and agriculture, underlined the importance of the prize in supporting the great efforts made by Saudi Arabia to address and reduce water scarcity.
The Surface Water Prize went to Dr. Wilfried Brutsaert from Cornell University in the US.
He developed, demonstrated and validated a new theory that can generate unprecedented estimates of evaporation in the natural landscape, with successful applications in numerous locations.
The Groundwater Prize was awarded to Dr. Martinus Theodorus van Genuchten from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, for developing and applying key theoretical and software tools that describe water flow and contaminant transport in soil and groundwater systems.
This has helped to define modern hydrogeology.