Professor Andrew Wade
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+44 (0)118 378 7315
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Professor of Hydrology
- Research in water resources in mountain environments, water pollution, and novel sensor technologies for hydrology and water quality.
- Independent expert providing specialist advice, analysis and review on the topics of hydrology and water quality for international scientific committees, UK and overseas government, NERC,
- business and the legal profession.
- Contributing author to Chapter 5: Land, Nature and Food of The Fourth Climate Change Risk Assessment – CCRA4-IA Technical Report 2026.
- Departmental Director of Laboratories.
- Postgraduate research supervision.
- Module convenor: GV2WES – Water in Earth System and GV3GED – Dissertations.
Office
108Building location
RussellAreas of interest
- Mountain water resources and their relationship with downstream agriculture to promote sustainable use of water given climate and crop production change.
- Novel technologies for high-resolution flow and water quality monitoring to determine biogeochemical processes and pollutant fate.
- National and catchment scale water quality assessment and modelling, with an emphasis on ecosystems services, and a reduction of the impacts on freshwaters of agricultural production and effluent disposal.
- Determination of how the land-surface and Atmospheric Rivers interact to cause UK winter floods.
Postgraduate supervision
Andrew has supervised numerous students to completion with recent topics including:
- Quantifying the effectiveness of Natural Flood Management in lowland catchments.
- Capitalising on the Big Data era: establishing a multi-source monitoring framework for England's natural capital assets and flows.
- Developing risk-based approaches to modelling phosphorus contamination in agricultural catchments.
- Image velocimetry for measuring river surface flows.
- High resolution mapping of pollutants using innovative uncrewed survey boats.
- Nitrogen cycling in a calcareous fen peatland: stresses, controls and variability.
- Modelling impacts of climate change on maize production in south-eastern Kazakhstan.
- Characterising water sources and runoff partitioning in the mountains of Central Asia using stable isotopes.
Research centres and groups
Environmental Science Research DivisionResearch projects
Current research projects (and focus of contribution)
- Future water resources in glacier-fed catchments: cryosphere component melt and downstream water quality in the Chilean Andes. Royal Society. With Dr Francisco Fernandoy and Justinne Rybertt (Universidad Andres Bello). Focus on determining relative melt contributions from different cryosphere components and water pollution severity.
- Quantifying contributions of mountain cryosphere components to groundwater recharge using isotopic analysis. (Led by Prof. Maria Shahgedanova). Royal Geographical Society – Gilchrist Fieldwork Award. Focus on quantifying the link between mountain recharge in glaciated catchments and downstream aquifers.
- Ancestral hydraulic systems for the adaptation and resilience of agroecological food systems in high Andean communities of the Cordillera Negra of Ancash, Peru, facing climate change. McKnight Foundation. (Led by Eric Coppen, ECLOSIO and Christian Florencio, Ucoopia). Focus on evaluation of restored pre-Hispanic dams for water provision in mountain areas with low rainfall.
- Food Systems Equality – FoodSEqual (Led by Prof. Carol Wagstaff), BBSRC led Transforming UK Food Systems – Strategic Priorities Fund. Focus on the development of a national-scale ecosystem-services model with emphasis on food production, water quality, carbon sequestration, pollination and (bird) biodiversity.
Background
- Andrew has worked on hydrology and water quality for over 25 years and led, or co-led, major projects investigating the muti-scale response of water quality, biodiversity and carbon sequestration to coupled macronutrient cycling, the development of novel water chemistry sensors, and the quantification of the impacts of projected land use and climate change on freshwater ecosystems, and has co-authored key reviews of the impacts of climate change on water quality and the links between hydrology and water quality.
Recently completed projects include an assessment of the influence of cryosphere and land cover on the water quality of glacierized catchments in the Tien Shan and Pamir mountains, the evaluation of biofertilizer use on rice yield and nitrogen losses in East China, and an assessment of Climate Resilience and Food Production in Peru - CROPP. Andrew has designed water quality monitoring networks in glacierised catchments, and completed multiple field seasons in Jordan, Chile, Peru, Iceland, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. - Andrew has co-supervised many students who have successfully completed a PhD and who have published recently on the topics including: the development of Bayesian Belief Networks for assessment of phosphorus losses, the novel use of big data for quantifying cultural ecosystem services, flood production through atmospheric river interactions with the land surface, and storm-track derivation using stable water isotopes.
- Andrew led the development of the Integrated Catchment Model of Phosphorus and supported the development of a next generation model, much reduced in complexity, SimplyP, and has contributed to the development of numerous other modelling approaches including: INCA-N, a Bayesian network of freshwater macroinvertebrate response to multiple stressors, and a conceptual understanding of dissolved organic matter in freshwaters, UniDOM.
- Andrew has contributed to rapid assessments of the water environment in England for Defra and the EA, the Living With Environmental Change (LWEC) work to assess climate change impacts on the UK water resource, and has been a reviewer, nominated by DECC and Defra, of IPCC and IPBES reports. He is a current member of the NERC Freshwater Programme Advisory Group and the DEFRA Interim Water Advisory Panel, and has provided recent advice to Waitrose and the German Science and Humanities Council as part of the German Universities of Excellence funding programme.
- Andrew obtained a BSc (1994) in Physics from the University of Leicester, a MSc in Engineering Hydrology (1995) from Newcastle University, and a PhD (1999) in Physical Geography from the University of Aberdeen. He worked at the Macaulay Land Use Research Institute (now the James Hutton Institute) on understanding the controls on water quality in large UK river systems, then moved to the University of Reading in 1999 being promoted to Professor in 2011. Andrew has been Head of Department (2019 – 2022), School Director of Research (2012-2015) and School Director of Postgraduate Studies (2009-2012). He holds a Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy and has taught hydrology for over 20 years.