A PIONEERING water scientist whose work saw him research top-secret atomic weapons, droughts in East Africa and water catchment in the UK has died, aged 86.

Hydrologist Dr James McCulloch, known as Jim, arrived in Wallingford to head a research unit within the Hydraulics Research Station, at the Howbery Park estate, in 1964.

His rapid rise saw him go from managing eight staff in the attic of a manor house to leading 150 people in his own dedicated building and institute by 1968.

This was helped by a surge in interest in his field after floods affected the area in the 1960s.

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Five years later it was an award-winning centre, signing contracts with bodies around the globe such as the British Government and the World Bank.

Under Dr McCulloch, the institute widened research into floods and droughts to include remote sensing techniques, climate change and man-made effects on the quality of water.

After retiring from full-time work, he took on a newly-created globetrotting position with Government-funded body the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), as well as the UN, and two editorships at scientific journals.

An only child, James McCulloch, known as Jim, was born in Edinburgh on September 11, 1928, to parents George, a postal worker, and Lilias, a schoolteacher.

His father died when he was just seven, so he and his mother went to live with her father on a Highlands farm at Brodie, near the seaside town of Nairn.

It was those early years that fostered his interest in agriculture.

He attended a village primary school, followed by the Nairn Academy, leaving in 1945. He went to Edinburgh University to read physics and mathematics.

He graduated in 1950 and went on to Rothamsted Experimental Station, in Harpenden, now called Rothamsted Research.

There, he studied water movement in soil under respected British meteorologist Howard Penman, while completing a masters degree at Imperial College, London.

During national service he hoped to be a meteorologist for the Royal Air Force, but at the height of the Cold War there was more urgent need for physicists to carry out top-secret research into atomic weapons.

He was hired by the Ministry of Supply for a project considered so sensitive that he was not told what he would be doing or where he would be doing it.

It was recently after Klaus Fuchs, a German spy, had been convicted of supplying information from the American, British and Canadian Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union.

Dr McCulloch was sent to Fort Halstead, in Kent, to begin work on flying trials for the organisation that would later be known as the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority.

But the research was frustrating work for a scientist who sought a more creative environment and so in 1955 he boarded a voyage to Kenya to work for the East Africa Agriculture and Forestry Research Organisation, outside Nairobi, with the Colonial Service.

A highlight of his scientific career, it provided exciting opportunities to study shade trees on tea plantations and evaporation at high altitudes, as well river flows.

Low costs made pioneering field experiments possible and British Government investments bore remarkable results – increasing the understanding of droughts.

He stayed until 1963, when Kenya declared independence from Britain, returning to the UK in 1964 to head the Hydraulics Research Station’s hydrological research unit in Wallingford.

The Institute of Hydrology is now the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, part of the Natural Environment Research Council.

In 1983 Dr McCulloch became a founding member of the British Hydrological Society and in 1987 left the institute to travel the globe on behalf of NERC.

From 1990 he was managing editor of the Journal of Hydrology for a decade, before starting his own journal – Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, for the European Geophysical Society – which he ran until 2006.

Dr McCulloch married his wife Christine Sunley, a senior scientific officer with NERC, in 1973 in London. They lived together in the village of Burcot, near Berinsfield, and had their first child, Richard, in 1974, followed by Caroline in 1975.

Dr McCulloch’s hobbies included Scottish dancing, gardening, theatre, travel and keeping chickens and cats. He also developed properties and enjoyed tinkering with cars.

He died of prostate cancer in Sobell House hospice, on September 15. He is survived by his wife, his son and daughter, as well as three grandchildren, Evelyn, James and Samuel.

A funeral is to be held on Monday in Dorchester Abbey, in Dorchester on Thames, at 11am. Friends are welcome to attend the service.

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