GEOtop essentials

Being one of my more fruitful research products, GEOtop has so many posts that it can be really difficult to understand what it is in brief. GEOtop is a unique blend of a process-based hydrological model and a Land Surface Model. It in fact integrates both the water and energy budget: a characteristics that differentiate it from many other models. Recently there were many efforts in the same direction. However, these efforts combine different models together, while in GEOtop the processes description is intimately tied.

To start with GEOtop probably the best way is to read the two most general papers first.

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.

Endrizzi S., Gruber S., Dall’Amico M., Rigon R., GEOtop 2.0.: Simulating the combined energy and water balance at and below the land surface accounting for soil freezing, snow cover and terrain effects, Geosci. Model Dev., 2014

A set of around 30 hours video lectures is available from here.

Subsequently a good reading could be the history of GEOtop, meaning understanding the motivation that guided us in building it:

Second part: Up to version 0.5

First Part: The addition of Land atmosphere interactions, and beyond.
The not-so-out-of-date manual, can be found here.

All the journal papers published in Journals, here.
The main presentations (mostly invited) about GEOtop can be found here. 

We were used to compile and provide executables of GEOtop code for any platform (see old Executables for Mac OS X Yosemite, Executables for Windows 7, Executables for Linux).

However, very recently, we "dockerised" the code, which is now available at the docker hub (this marks some difference with what explained in the video lectures).

There are two mailing for GEOtop:

• The user list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/geotopusers
• and the developer list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/geotopdev

Both of them contain relevant information and are the place where to ask for help (depending on which is your case) keeping in mind that GEOtop is an open source project with a very low financial support, so any answer is a courtesy not a duty.

The official repository of the code is on GIThub.

The overall set of information, including new directions, is here.
A set of matlab script for importing and exporting data is here.