Monday, December 30, 2013

Turbulence

Want to start with turbulence ? Start first with fluid dynamics:
  • George Batchelor [Old, but classics]
    • An Introduction to Fluid Dynamics ( I have the feeling to be able to do better in some parts - but without trying it how one can say ?)
Some freely available resources:

Regarding Turbulence itself, I would start from on-line resources, and the first reading could easily be:
which could continue continue with some selected topics by

If I have to choose just other three references, I would select (in brackets [ ] Shalizi's -see below-comments, in  ( ) my comments) :
  • George Batchelor [Old, but classics]
  • Uriel FrischTurbulence: The Legacy of A. N. Kolmogorov [An excellent introduction, very strong on defending Kolmogorov's work from misunderstandings and invalid criticisms.] One paper that summarizes Frisch view is here
and a different, but, in my opinion in the long-term the winning perspective:
Of the latter this paper by David Ruelle can be a complement.

Also the old classic book by Tennekes and Lumley  is available, legally or not, on-line, here.

Other stuff  which is intriguing me, are random cascades (and turbulence), a topic that I came to know through the work of Ed Waymire, and that you can come close by reading:
Also interesting is the works on rinormalization group and turbulences of which this is a google synthesis.

Finally, you can look at the Cosma Shalizi's bibliography. Huge and overwhelming indeed, it was the starting point of this my own post.

Sunday, December 29, 2013

Snowflakes (is Christmas time after all, and I live in a boreal place)

Christmas time remembered me to give a look to snow crystal formation literature and models. To my surprise, a definitive (thermodynamic) theory of their formation does not exist. This is what can be deduced form the review paper by the K.G. Libbrecht (2005).  Even if in two subsequent papers (2012 and 2013) he tries to delineate a possible path towards a comprehensive theory. Actually the attention to Libbrecht paper was brought to me by a paper on a three-dimensional model of snow-fakes (fakes ;-), not flakes) by Gravner and Griffeath. For a classification of snow crystal, Magono paper, would be fine. I am looking forward to read them all (starting from the Libbrecht review and his two most recent papers, which seem to add something) and complete this post more appropriately eventually. For the moment, be happy with the bibliography.

Some of the  references could look strange (e.g. Fu et al., 2006). In that case, I was looking for literature in the area of fractal surfaces. Something else should be available.  In particular, I was looking for a papers by J. Nittman and  Eugene Stanley (a "star" among the "fractalists"). In any case, growth of this type of forms is pretty general and ubiquitous (as shown in many papers, and in particular, in Ben Jacob's ones).

I also indulged in adding some papers about snow crystal methamorphism. This is not the topic of the post, but for the moment I keep trace of them in here. Other papers were just added for getting some general reference to crystal growth (e.g. the Krug's one, and those looking to micro-meteorological aspects of the growth).

Interesting readings are also addressed in this older post.



References

Ben Jacob, E. (1993). From snowflake formation to growth of bacterial colonies: Part I. Diffusive patterning in azoic systems. Contemporary Physics, 34(5), 247–273. doi:10.1080/00107519308222085

Ben-Jacob, E. (1997). From snowflake formation to growth of bacterial colonies II: Cooperative formation of complex colonial patterns. Contemporary Physics, 38(3), 205–241. doi:10.1080/001075197182405

Chen, J. P., & Lamb, D. (1994). Simulation of Cloud Microphisical and Chemical Processes using a Multicomponent Framework. Part I: Description of the Microphysical Model. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, 51(18), 2613–2630.

Chen, S., & Baker, I. (2010). Evolution of individual snowflakes during metamorphism. Journal of Geophysical Research, 115(D21), D21114. doi:10.1029/2010JD014132

Fu, F., Liu, L., Yang, K., & Wang, L. (2006). The structure of the self-organized blogosphere. arXiv:Physics, 1–5.

Fukuta, N., & Takahashi, T. (1999). The Growth of Atmospheric Ice Crystals: A Summary of Findings in Vertical Supercooled Cloud Tunnel Studies. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, 56(12), 1963–1979. doi:10.1175/1520-0469(1999)056<1963:TGOAIC>2.0.CO;2

Gravner, J., & Griffeath, D. (2007). Modeling snow crystal growth III: three dimensional  snow fakes. arXiv:Physics, 1–39.

Gravner, J., & Griffeath, D. (2009a). Modeling snow-crystal growth: A three-dimensional mesoscopic approach. Physical Review E, 79(1), 011601. doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.79.011601

Krug, J. (2002). Four Lectures on the Physics of Crystal GrowtharXivcond-Math, 1–43.

Libbrecht, K. G. (2005). The physics of snow crystals. Reports on Progress in Physics. doi:10.1088/0034-4885/68/4/R03
Libbrecht, K. G. (2013a). Aerodynamical Effects in Snow Cristal Growthth. arXiv:Physics, 1–23.

Libbrecht, K. G. (2013b). Toward a Comprehensive Model of Snow Crystal Growth Dynamics: 2. Structure Dependent Attachment Kinetics near -5 C. arXivcond-Math, 1–13.

Magono, C., & Lee, C. W. (1966). Meterological Classification of Natural Snow Crystals. Journal Of the Faculty of Sciences, Hokkaido University, Japan, 2(4), 312–345.

Nelson, J. (2005). Branch Growth and Sidebranching in Snow Crystals. Crystal Growth & Design, 5(4), 1509–1525. doi:10.1021/cg049685v

Nittmann, J., & Stanley, H. E. (1987). Non-deterministic approach to anisotropic growth patterns with continuously tunable morphology: the fractal properties of some real snowflakes. Journal of Physics a: Mathematical Genereral

Nelson, J., & Knight, C. (1998). Snow Crystal Habit Changes Explained by Layer Nucleation. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, 55(8), 1452–1465. doi:10.1175/1520-0469(1998)055<1452:schceb>2.0.co;2

Rango, A., P, W. W., & Erbe, E. F. (1996). Snow crystal imaging using scanning electron microscopy: I. Precipitated snow. Hydrological Sciences–Journal–Des Sciences Hydrologiques, 41(2), 219–233.

Rango, A., P, W. W., & Erbe, E. F. (1996b), Snow crystal imaging using scanning  electron microscopy: II. Metamorphosed snowHydrological Sciences–Journal–Des Sciences Hydrologiques41(2), 235–250.

Reiter, C. A. (2005). A local cellular model for snow crystal growth. Chaos Solitons & Fractals, 23(4), 1111–1119. doi:10.1016/j.chaos.2004.06.071

Monday, December 16, 2013

USGS r-packages for hydrology

As I learn AGU Fall meeting, USGS is committed to develop various R Packages to help analysis of hydrological data.

These packages include:
  • GLRItcl
  • usgs-r.github.com: Splash page for USGS-R organization
  • EflowStats: Calculates Hydrologic Indicator stats and fundamental properties of daily streamflow for a given set of data
  • EGRET: An R-package for the analysis of long-term changes in water quality and streamflow, including the water-quality method Weighted Regressions on Time, Discharge, and Season (WRTDS)
  • EflowStats: Calculates Hydrologic Indicator stats and fundamental properties of daily streamflow for a given set of data. A related poster, presented at AGU Fall meeting 2013, can be found here.
  • USGSwsBase: Base USGS water science R functions.
  • surragateRegression
  • dataRetrieval: This R package is designed to obtain its water quality sample data, streamflow data, and metadata directly from either the USGS NWIS (National Water Information System), but it allows for user-supplied text files as inputs. The program is designed to ingest the data directly into R and structure them into file structures suited for EGRET analysis.
  • USGSwsQW: Water quality USGS water science R functions.
  • USGSwsStats:Statistic USGS water science R functions.
  • USGSwsData: Data sets as data.frames and as text files for examples in the USGS core pacakges
  • USGSwsGraphs: Graphical USGS water science R functions
  • restrend
  • rloadest
  • DVstats
  • NWCCompare
  • rGDP
  • functionCollection
All of them can be retrieved from the USGS-R Github repository. Link to other R packages useful for hydrology can be found at the main R post.

The Abouthydrology mailing list (at googlegroups)

Tired of keeping your own (and often outdated) list of colleagues to advertise your conference session, Ph.D. and postdoc positions, or other research opportunities?
Do you have a free software program or textbook of interest to the hydrologic community?
Wish you could just send one email and have it reach hundreds of your colleagues?

  Welcome to the About Hydrology mailing list! This acts the very same way the Gilbert Club list does for geomorphologists in being used to send announces about events, Ph.D. and post-doc positions, new books, open source software, AGU and EGU sessions and so on. All about hydrology, obviously.

The list has so far  (November 2020) almost 4000 active subscribers, and therefore sending around information through it is pretty effective, and save you the weight to maintain your own list of email addresses. 
To subscribe go to the page: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/abouthydrology  or Search “AboutHydrology Google Group”. Maintaners of the group are me, Stacey Archfield,  Giuseppe Formetta and Marialaura Bancheri.

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

GEOtop 2.0 at AGU 2013 - II - The Cryosphere

In this marathon I am doing at this Fall AGU Meeting, I am also giving a second talk about GEOtop 2.0. But this time I talk about the simulations of the snow modelling and the soil freezing.
The presentation is mainly based on the work initiated with Stefano Endrizzi and Matteo Dall'Amico thesis, and subsequently pursed together with Stephan Gruber of Zurich University, now at Carleton University. The two reference papers are Dall'Amico et al. 2011 and Endrizzi et al., 2013, cited in the talk, but also the work in Gubler et al. 2013 is extremely relevant for all the testing it performed on the models
.
So clicking on the image, as usual, you will gain access to the presentation. While, in the first post I took the occasion for adding the References of GEOtop, in this case I just collect the main presentations on the topic that you can find below.

GEOtop relevant presentation

Especially important to understand GEOtop history (see also these post: I and II).
http://www.slideshare.net/GEOFRAMEcafe/geotop-2008

GEOtop, the making of version 1.45  (Summer school on Environmental Dynamics, 2011)
summarised concepts already present in GEOtop 2008 presentation.

GEOtop, the snow modelling (now actually obsolete ... but a good reading for the general concepts)


Monday, December 9, 2013

GEOtop 2.0 at AGU 2013

I was invited to talk at a Fall AGU Meeting section about High Resolution Hydrological modelling. This is the topic of the H21M session of the meeting.  The following, below (clicking on) the figure is my interpretation of the topic.

I describe GEOtop 2.0, present a few case studies, and took the occasion to do some synthesis of this work. All the merits go to my co-authors, that in the last years strongly believed and pushed GEOtop beyond what it was. The presentation does not cover the cryospheric part of the models, which will be the focus of the second presentation.

This other posts covers my second presentation at AGU, talking about how the cryosphere is modeled in GEOtop 2.0.

GEOtop bibliography (so far)

Bertoldi, G., Rigon, R., & Over, T. M. (2006). Impact of Watershed Geomorphic Characteristics on the Energy and Water Budgets. Journal of Hydrometeorology,, 7, 389–403.

Bertoldi, G., Notarnicola, C., Leitinger, G., Endrizzi, S., Della Chiesa, S., Zebisch, M., & Tappeiner, U. (2010). Topographical and ecohydrological controls on land surface temperature in an Alpine catchment. Ecohydrology, 3(doi:10.1002/eco.129), 189–204.

Bertoldi G.; Della Chiesa, S; Notarnicola, C.; Pasolli, L.; Niedrist, G; Tappeiner, U. (2013), Estimation of soil moisture patterns in mountain grasslands by means of SAR RADARSAT 2 images and hydrological modeling, submitted to Journal of Hydrology


Bertoldi, G., Della, S., Notarnicola, C., Pasolli, L., Niedrist, G., & Tappeiner, U. (2014). Estimation of soil moisture patterns in mountain grasslands by means of SAR RADARSAT2 images and hydrological modeling. Journal of Hydrology, 516, 245–257. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2014.02.018
Dall’Amico, M.; Endrizzi, S., Gruber, S; and Rigon, R. (2011), An energy-conserving model of freezing variably-saturated soil, The Cryosphere.

Della Chiesa, S.; Bertoldi, G.; Niedrist G., Obojes, N.; Albertson, J. D.; Wohlfahrt,G.; Hörtnagl L., Tappeiner U.,  (2014),  Modelling changes in grassland hydrological cycling along an elevational gradient in the Alps, Ecohydrol. 7, 1453–1473 (2014), DOI: 10.1002/eco.1471

Eccel, E., Cordano, E., & Zottele, F. (2015). A project for climatologic mapping of soil water content in Trentino. Italian Journal of Agrometeorology, 1(500 m), 5–20.
Endrizzi S. and Marsh P. Observations and modeling of turbulent fluxes during melt at the shrub-tundra transition zone 1: point scale variations, (2010) Hydrology Research

Endrizzi S., Gruber S., Investigating the effects of lateral water flow on spatial patterns of ground temperature, depth of thaw and ice content, Peer reviewed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Permafrost, 25–29 June 2012, Salekhard, Russia, 91–96, 2012

Endrizzi S., Gruber S., Dall’Amico M., Rigon R., GEOtop 2.0. (2014), Simulating the combined energy and water balance at and below the land surface accounting for soil freezing, snow cover and terrain effects, 7(6), 2831–2857. https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-7-2831-2014

Fiddes, J., Endrizzi, S., & Gruber, S. (2015). Large-area land surface simulations in heterogeneous terrain driven by global data sets : application to mountain permafrost. The Cryosphere, 9, 411–426. https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-9-411-2015

Fiddes, J., & Gruber, S. (2012). TopoSUB: a tool for efficient large area numerical modelling in complex topography at sub-grid scales. Geoscientific Model Development, 5(5), 1245–1257. https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-5-1245-2012

Formetta, G., Rigon R., David, O., Green, T. R., Capparelli, G. (2016), Integration of a spatial hydrological model (GEOtop) into the Object Modeling System (OMS), Water 8(1), 12

Gubler S., Endrizzi S., Gruber S., Purves R. S., Sensitivity and uncertainty of modeled ground temperatures and related variables in mountain environments, Geosci. Model Dev., 6, 1319–1336, 2013.

Gebremichael, M., Rigon, R., Bertoldi, G., & Over, T. M. (2009). On the scaling characteristics of observed and simulated spatial soil moisture fields, Nonlin. Processes Geophys., 16, 141–150.

Hingerl, L., Kunstmann, H., Wagner, S., Mauder, M., Bliefernicht, J., & Rigon, R. (2016). Spatio-temporal variability of water and energy fluxes - a case study for a mesoscale catchment in pre-alpine environment. Hydrological Processes. https://doi.org/10.1002/hyp.10893

Kunstmann, H.,  Hingerl, L., Mauder, M.,  Wagner, S., and Rigon, R., A combined water and energy flux observation and modelling study at the TERENO-preAlpine observatory, Climate and Land-surface Changes in Hydrology, Proceedings of H01, IAHS-IAPSO-IASPEI Assembly, Gothenburg, Sweden, July 2013 (IAHS Publ. 359, 2013)

Lewis, C., Albertson, J., Zi, T., Xu, X., & Kiely, G. (2013). How does afforestation affect the hydrology of a blanket peatland? A modelling study. Hydrological Processes, 27(25), 3577–3588. https://doi.org/10.1002/hyp.9486

Rigon, R., Bertoldi, G., & Over, T. M. (2006). GEOtop: A Distributed Hydrological Model with Coupled Water and Energy Budgets. Journal of Hydrometeorology, 7, 371–388.

Simoni, S., Zanotti, F., Bertoldi, G., & Rigon, R. (2007). Modelling the probability of occurrence of shallow landslides and channelized debris flows using GEOtop-FS. Hydrological Processes, doi: 10.10.

Zanotti, F., Endrizzi, S., Bertoldi, G., & Rigon, R. (2004). The GEOtop snow module. Hydrol. Proc., 18, 3667–3679. DOI:10.1002/hyp.5794.

Zi, T., Kumar, M., Kiely, G., Lewis, C., & Albertson, J. (2016). Simulating the spatio-temporal dynamics of soil erosion, deposition , and yield using a coupled sediment dynamics and 3D distributed hydrologic model. Environmental Modelling and Software, 83, 310–325. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2016.06.004

Ph.D Thesis


Giacomo Bertoldi (2004) The water and energy balance at basin scale: a distributed modeling approachDownload PDF

Stefano Endrizzi (2009), Snow cover modelling at a local and distributed scale over complex terrain

Silvia Simoni (2009), A Comprehensive Approach to Landslide Triggering.

Matteo Dall'Amico (2011), Coupled Water and Heat Transfer in Permafrost Modeling.

Ageel Ibrahim Bushara (2011), Hydrological simulations at basin scale using distributed model and remote sensing with a focus of soil moisture.

GEOtop Manual

GEOtop Manual (a little out-of-date with respect to GEOtop 2.0 ... but not so much).

The Presentation at the Mountain Research Initiative Key Contact Workshop held in Berkeley Dec 8, 2013

After a few years, I am back to San Francisco AGU meeting. It is  a place where I grew up, since I participated ten times in 22 years.  For the very same reason that the fall meeting is crowded with more than twenty thousands of geophysicists coming from all around the World, many side meetings are organized. The MRI side meeting is one of these, and I participated.
The meeting involved a small group of people (around twenty) but was really interesting and productive. One can find all the contribution to discussion on the MRI website. At the moment, you can see my contribution by clicking on the image above. For knowing more about my research activities, these two posts can be useful: My past Research, Research Topics for the next 20 years.

Thursday, December 5, 2013

CUASHI ciber-seminars

For who do not, CUASHI stands for  Consortium of University for the Advancement of Hydrological sciences. The institution is a source of many good initiatives, among which, the hydrologic information system (HIS), a cyber-infrastructure for storing and distributing data.  However, one of the activity of CUASHI is covering with cyberseminars (more than one hundred so far) many aspects of hydrological research and practice.
Following the link you will findthe whole serie of seminar, in alphabetic order.  Out of them I chose ten, not necessarily the best, but those that have attracted my attention. All of them are the product of first class hydrologist, whose publication and studies deserve, in any case, attention. Here they are:

Bode, Collin - University of California, Berkeley
HydroWatch: An Open source Sensor Observatory
Recorded presentation

DeLuca, Cecelia - National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
ESMF and Earth System Curator: Integrated Modeling Infrastructure for Virtual Communities
Recorded presentation

Marks, Danny - USDA ARS, Northwest Watershed Research Center
An Outdoor Hydro-Climatic Laboratory for the 21st Century: 45 Years of Research and Data Collection at the Reynolds Creek Experimental Watershed
Recorded presentation

Molotch, Noah – Research at the Western Critical Zone Observatories
Snowmelt as a Driver of Ecohydrological Processes: Low-hanging Fruit for Cross-CZO Research
Recorded presentation

Pomeroy, John - University of Saskatchewan
Advancing Hydrological Processes to Better Predict Hydrology in Cold Regions
Recorded presentation

Selker, John - Oregon State University
Methods in Hydrologic Science: The Synergies between Redundant Low-cost Wireless Sensors and the Data Cloud Come of Age
Recorded presentation

Smith, Jim - Princeton University
Flooding in the Urban Environment
Recorded presentation

Tarboton, David & David R. Maidment - Utah State University & University of Texas, Austin
State and Regional Hydrologic Information Systems
Recorded presentation

Vogel, Richard - Tufts University
Hydromorphology: The Shape of our Water Future
Recorded presentation

Wagener, Thorsten - Pennsylvania State University
Hydrologic Similarity and the Search for a Catchment Classification Framework
Recorded presentation

Friday, November 29, 2013

MeteoIO

MeteoIO is a library that provides various interpolation methods for 1D and 2D data. It has been used for the SnowPack and Alpine3D models, and recently we started also to use it for GEOtop. GEOtop has its own interpolation routines but MeteoIO is supported by a larger community of developers, and therefore, why reinvent the well again and again ?

For this reason in  GEOtop 2.0 MeteoIo was added. Models uniforming to MeteoIO conventions can also use the INIShell Java program that provides a graphic user interface "for free".

On october 23th a small seminar was held in Eurac, Bolzano,  to illustrate the use of MeteoIO. The presentation by Mathias Bavey can be found here.

Sunday, November 17, 2013

Mathematics for the Fluid Earth

"The fluid Earth is an excellent example of a forced, dissipative non-equilibrium system dominated by nonlinear processes and featuring multi-scale interactions, so that its understanding can be approached using the tools of dynamical systems theory and non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. The understanding of the statistical properties of a system under consideration is crucial per se and in a variety of applications, especially when considering large fluctuations which may result into extreme events of relevant impact. The differential equations that describe mathematically the fluid components, in particular the Navier-Stokes equations and their many variants and reductions, are at the core of the work of any analyst working in nonlinear PDEs. The many fundamental questions still open are often precisely the questions at the heart of the link between analysts and geophysicists."



Hosted by the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences this is a series of video seminars of real interest for geoscientists. You can find it by clicking on Newton's image

A Java Implementation of R !

Since I am becoming a Java programmer, and an R evangelist,  I found very interesting the FastR project whose scope is to provide a Java implementation of the R language. This would be really interesting, especially thinking to a possible integration among OMS and R, which would be very helpful for data management and I/O for model components.

Jan Vitek, one of the authors of the code, gave a nice presentation about, that can be found below the image.

Any comment is left to the readings and to the trial of the software. Eventually,  other material and  code itself, can be found at github

Sunday, November 10, 2013

Process based models of landslides' triggering. My talk at Cosenza on November the 7th

Last November the 7th, I was invited to give a talk about process-based models of landslides triggering.  My talk (you can find it here) was mainly about the key elements for describing hillslope hydrology and stability, and inherits a lot on my previous talk at the Praia a Mare Summer School.
However there is some new material, and especially I mentioned the work made for embedding GEOtop into OMS, and the recent work we made for the IWL Round Robin.
At the seminar there were other three interesting topics by Giovanna Capparelli, Fausto Guzzetti (see also the website of his group) and Roberto Greco. The latter, one of the author of the IWL organisers and designer of the IWL3  "round robin". At the round robin (we did not arrive in time for presenting our work) some Spanish guys won (with the best predictions of the suctions of the experiment) by running a model that solves the coupled Richards and Stress equations.  As it will result for giving a look to the slides, our trial was not successful: but because we tried to reproduce contemporarily both suction and water content. We fail. This can only means that the soil water retention curves used were not appropriate. We do not know however if the case is that the vanGenuchten parameterisation is failing (and/or Mualem that gives hydraulic conductivity) or if the parameterisation is actually time-dependent, as the strategy used by the Spanish guys seems to suggest. 
In my opinion, it is reasonable that soil water retention curves vary after soil starts to move, but I  am not sure that a dynamical parameterisation would be required before the failure time. 

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Regional Risk Assessment methodologies for water related hazards and climate change by Paolo Ronco et al.

The above was the title of the seminar held today at CUDAM of University of Trento. The speaker was Paolo Ronco  of Ca' Foscari University of Venice.
The seminar was a positive meeting of a few but qualified and interested people. The entire seminar is now visible on-line by clicking on the image above.

Climate Change Adaptation strategies - Brescia Workshop on October 10 2013 presentations

Among the duties for the Alpine Convention's Water Platform there is the organisation of workshops with the scope to share experiences of best practices among the alpine countries. Best practices, in this case for the adaptation to Climate Change with respect to Flood Risk and Water Management.

In Brescia, last month, officers of Italy, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Slovenia met and developed an interesting conversation on these topics.



Here you can access to all of the presentations:

The Austrian Strategy for adaptation to climate change (focus water ressources and water management) by: Mario Unterwainig, Division Water management in residential areas Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, Environment and Water Management

Bavarian Climate Programme 2020
by: Christian Wanger Bavarian State Ministry of the Environment and Public Health

CC Adaptation Strategy in Italy: from national level to the Alpine region
by: Paolo Angelini, Ministry of the Environment, Land and Sea and by Antonio Ballarin-Denti, Lombardy Foundation for the Environment

Flood event June 2013 in Bavaria Lessons learned in managing natural hazards
by: Bavarian Environment Agency

Management of water issues in the adaption plans
by: Rudolf Hornich Federal Government of Styria Watermanagement

Inland water ecosystems: critical issues in the management of water quantity and quality and monitoring priorities
by: Pierluigi Viaroli, Department of Life Sciences, University of Parma, Italy

Alpine Strategy for Adaptation to Climate Change in the Field of Natural Hazards Platform on Natural Hazards of the Alpine Convention PLANALP by: Andreas Pichler, Member of PLANALP Austrian Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, Environment and Water Management

Governing Disasters under a changing climate: Challenges, Limitations, Lessons learnt. An Austrian perspective
by: Andreas Pichler, BMLFUW, Austria

Conflicts and difficulties in the integration of WFD and Flood Directive: nature vs. protection?by:Tobias Hafner, Bavarian State Ministry of the Environment and Public Health

Climate Change and Risk Management in Switzerland Case study Grindelwald
by: Hugo Aschwanden, Swiss Federal Office for the Environment

Thoughts about the "best" planning instrument for climate change adaptation on local scale on the example of the Autonomous Province of Bolzano
by: Andreas Paul Zischg, PLANALP – Italian delegation

Floods on Drava River Basin November 2012 in Slovenia - Lessons learned
by: Milica Slokar, Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Slovenia Administration for Civil Protection and Disaster Relief (ACPDR) and by Jože Papež, HIDROTEHNIK Water management, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Activities on water and adaptation to climate change in the framework of the UNECE Water Convention
by: Sarah Tiefenauer-Linardon, UNECE Water Convention

The funding possibilities to build up adaptation capacities and take action
by: Federica Alcozer Studio GAP associati, planning consultant

Regional Adaptation Strategy: the case of Lombardy Region by: Antonio Ballarin-Denti. Dept. of Mathematics and Physics, Catholic University, Brescia Lombardy Foundation for the Environment

Other information about the adaptation strategies to Climate Changes (in the Alpine region) can be found in this previous post.

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Unesco Water Glossary

Diego Avesani, one of the Ph.D students of Alberto Bellin, brought to my attention the new UNESCO  Water Glossary. You can retrieve it by clicking on the image below.

UNESCO has a lot of water related programs that you can browse at their website.

Clima Trentino (About Trentino Climate and adaptation to Climate Change)

I will use this page to collect all the material about Climate change impacts related to Water and Hydrology (and at relatively small scales) going towards the Fitfth Water Conference of the Alpine Convention (to be held in September 25-26 2014) which will cover this topic in detail.
I will start with the material (In Italian) of the meeting Clima: quale futuro per la Terra (Climate which future  form Earth) which I co-organized with Clima Trentino the recent October 21.
You will find two presentations the first a very nice introduction to climate change and adaptation by Antonio Navarra, and the second about the Italian strategy to Climate change adaptation by Sergio Castellari. Both of them of the  Center euro-Mediterranean for  Climate Change (CMCC).

The Italian National strategy was finally disclosed yesterday by the Italian Ministry of Environment,  Andrea Orlando, and can be found here.

Yesterday I also met Marcela Olmedo, an anthropologist who works on Adaptation of Climate Change and Water. She is the author of an interesting blog: http://www.environmentalanthropology.net and her woork on climate change adaptation can be found here.

The presentations and work of the Workshop on Climate Change Adaptation held in Brescia on October 10th, and organised by the Water Platform of the Alpine Convention, can instead be found here.

The seminar on the KultuRisk EU Project, held in Trento November the 5th by Paolo Ronco of University of Venice, can be accessed from here.

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

WorldDEM dataset

My Ph.D student Wuletawu Abera brought to my attention the WorlDEM data set. It will be a global DEM with unsurpassed precision covering all the Earth (Pole to Pole, not as SRTM from 60 degree North to 60 degree South).
The detail of this product can be found in the GISResources website. Unfirtunately, it seems you have to pay for it.

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

The "summer" School on Object Modelling System in Trento 2013

The "summer" school started yesterday.  All the material prepared by Olaf David, Gabriella Turek and Giuseppe Formetta is here (link no more available: but the link beow work) where you can find presentations and code.
If you are probably interested to OMS3 tools, you can probably start with the 2016 Summer School Material now.


In day one there was a general overview of OMS and what it does, through the presentations of Olaf David (presentation here), Gabriella Turek  and Giuseppe Formetta (presentations here). The lectures and the video can be found here at the LODE site by Marco Ronchetti.

Monday lectures covered mostly an overview of the system, including:


In the second day we started to approach the concept of components and see some first example of components integration.



Third day starts with the Hello World example. Then continued with Two Component and Three Component.  After the coffee break we went into First Class Object Parameters. Next class examined was Conversion SPI for connecting components through some conversion of types. Bulk connect or how to get one component output for many component input.  At Name Alias substitutes long names component with shorter alias. Component logging to have a fine control on what you want to output, for instance in different phase of a projects. Simple Iteration for knowing how to iterate more time the execution of a command.

Fourth day is dedicated to applications. Giuseppe Formetta  talks about JGrasstools, JGrass-newAGE and the calibration algorithms embedded in it.




In the afternoon we give a look at the porting of the Sparrow program made by Gabriella Turek. Whilst in FORTRAN the program allows to understand how to integrate C/C++ legacy code.

2016 Summer school is here.

Enjoy !

P.S. - The complete series of posts on OMS3 can be found here.