My last exchange with Vijay Gupta was in December 2021, when, together with Vijay Dimri, Klaus Fraedrich, Witold Krajewski and Renzo Rosso, we prepared a communication for the IAHS 2022 conference with the title “How Scaling Helps Solve Problems in Hydrology”, which fits so well with Vijay that I cannot help but use it again for this brief tribute to him! Our paper addressed epistemic questions about how scaling is currently considered in the hydrological community roadmap "Twenty-Three Unsolved Problems in Hydrology" (UPH). We pointed out that scaling was only explicitly mentioned once in the group of problems"Space variability and scaling”, therefore limited to spatial variability The roadmap therefore neglected space-time scaling, while hydrological fields exhibit extreme variability over a wide range of space-time scales. Thanks to Vijay’s work and commitment, we could easily recall that hydrology has thus been an important source of inspiration for scaling methodologies, from precipitation to groundwater, from short-term to climate prediction. Moreover, scaling techniques have consequently become increasingly sophisticated and diverse, e.g., ranging from scalar self-similarity to multivariate multifractals or multifractal operators. These methods are primarily subject of academic research, but pioneering applications in operational hydrology are worth to be mentioned. We remain convinced that the community roadmap should identify the hydrological problems where advances in scaling approach have the potential to be most useful and the most important methodological challenges. I would like to recall that 20 years before Vijay has already an important impact on the hydrological research to be done. During the IUGG conference of 2002, Vijay and I had been discussing how to represent the paradigm change of the IAHS decade “Prediction of Ungauged Basins (PUB, 2002-2012). This resulted in the enclosed figure hat generated a lot of discussions, particularly during a very lively Townhall at AGU 2002. The message of this figure was indeed quite clear. Although, Vijay was incredibly modest, I think his work deserves some of the recognition of the important roles of complexity and intermittency by the Nobel Committee for Physics (https://doi.org/10.1029/2022EO220327).