Wilfried Brutsaert

Wilfried Brutsaert is a Belgian-born hydrologist, the William L. Lewis Professor of Engineering at Cornell University, known within the field as Mr. Evaporation for his decades of work quantifying how water moves from Earth surface into the atmosphere. Trained in water and soil engineering at the University of Ghent before earning a graduate degree in irrigation engineering at the University of California, Davis, he spent fifty years at Cornell developing theoretical and practical methods to estimate evaporation from land surfaces, work that underpins both remote sensing and ground based measurement of the global water cycle. His 1982 book Evaporation into the Atmosphere and his 2005 textbook Hydrology: An Introduction became standard references, and in 2022 he was awarded the Stockholm Water Prize, the field highest honor.