The number of rainfall observations from personal weather stations (PWSs) has increased significantly over the past years; however, there are persistent questions about data quality. In this paper, we reflect on three quality control algorithms (PWSQC, PWS-pyQC, and GSDR-QC) designed for the quality control (QC) of rainfall data. Technical and operational guidelines are provided to help interested users in finding the most appropriate QC to apply for their use case. All three algorithms can be accessed within the OpenSense sandbox where users can run the code. The results show that all three algorithms improve PWS data quality when cross-referenced against a rain radar data product. The considered algorithms have different strengths and weaknesses depending on the PWS and official data availability, making it inadvisable to recommend one over another without carefully considering the specific setting. The authors highlight a need for further objective quantitative benchmarking of QC algorithms. This requires freely available test datasets representing a range of environments, gauge densities, and weather patterns.

Editors of several journals in the field of hydrology met during the General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union—EGU in Vienna in April 2017. This event was a follow-up of similar meetings held in 2013 and 2015. These meetings enable the group of editors to review the current status of the journals and the publication process, and to share thoughts on future strategies. Journals were represented at the 2017 meeting by their editors, as shown in the list of authors. The main points on invigorating hydrological research through journal publications are communicated in this joint editorial published in the above journals.

Editors of several journals in the field of hydrology met during the Assembly of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences - IAHS (within the Assembly of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics - IUGG) in Prague in June 2015. This event was a follow-up of a similar meeting held in July 2013 in Gothenburg (as reported by Blöschl et al. [2014]). These meetings enable the group of editors to review the current status of the journals and the publication process, and share thoughts on future strategies. Journals were represented in the 2015 meeting through their editors, as shown in the list of authors. The main points on fostering innovation and improving impact assessment in journal publications in hydrology are communicated in this joint editorial published in the above journals.