Peter Wolf turned a fascination with water into an engineering career that earned him the epithet “the father of modern hydrology”. He worked on the plans for the Normandy landings, helped to build many large water-retention projects around the world and produced for the Government a report on flood defences that now seems ahead of its time.

Peter Otto Wolf was born in Austria, where his father was a railway executive. After school in St Polten he became a cadet in the Austrian Army, and started to study engineering at Vienna University, before his family fled the country after the Anschluss. He enrolled at King's College London in 1938. The department was then moved to Bristol, and he graduated in 1941 with a first from Queen Mary College. In 1944 he worked with British intelligence on the planning for the D-Day landings, especially in relation to European waterways. In the postwar expansion of hydroelectric schemes he was chief engineer for the Mullardoch Dam and others in Scotland.

In 1949 he became a lecturer at Imperial College in fluid mechanics and hydraulic engineering, becoming Reader in Hydrology in 1955. He founded the MSc course in the subject and was instrumental in the eventual acceptance of hydrology as a geoscience in its own right.

In 1966 he became head of the new Department of Civil Engineering at City University, London, then transforming itself from a college of advanced technology into a university. Wolf retained the successful BSc sandwich-course pattern and introduced a full-time equivalent and started MSc courses in structural, highways and water engineering. His priority was to create an efficient programme of education in civil engineering that was academically rigorous and professionally acceptable. During his custodianship, 1966-82, the department produced more than 1,500 graduates in civil engineering.

A devoted teacher, he was particularly concerned to help overseas students to settle in the society in which they found themselves. He gave similar support to academic staff who were exiles from the country of their birth.

He held visiting professorships at Stanford and Cornell, and in Mexico, Thailand and Germany.

After his retirement from City in 1982 he chaired the Government's consultative committee for flood protection. In 1985 this yielded the Wolf Report, whose proposals, if they had been implemented, he recently said, would have greatly diminished the UK floods of last summer.

He became a director of Pell Frischmann Consulting Engineers in 1992, and worked on many hydrological projects — of particular interest to him was the contamination of the water supply in the Upper Elbe Valley by wartime munitions. When he died, he was in the process of advising the Iraqi Ministry of Water Resources on how to address leakages in the Mosul Dam in Northern Iraq.

He was the first recipient of the Ray Linsley award from the American Institute of Hydrology set up to “recognise individuals who have made outstanding contributions in surface water hydrology”.

Wolf is survived by his second wife, Janet, and by two sons and a daughter.

Peter Wolf, hydrologist, was born on May 9, 1918. He died on October 5, 2007, aged 89