Two up-to-date contributions on Global Hydrology

I talk about global hydrology in a recent post. But, the topic is hot, and you do not have the time to relax, and a couple of authoritative papers are published on the global energy budget and the global water budget in the first slice of this century* **. Scientists never sleep.

L’Ecuyer, T. S., Beaudoing, H. K., Rodell, M., Olson, W., Lin, B., Kato, S., et al. (2015). The Observed State of the Energy Budget in the Early Twenty-First Century. Journal of Climate, 28(21), 8319–8346. http://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-14-00556.1

M. Rodell, H.K. Beaudoing, T.S. L’Ecuyer, W.S. Olson J.S. Famiglietti, P.R. Houser, R. Adler, M.G. Bosilovich, C.A. Clayson, D. Chambers, E. Clark, E.J. Fetzer, X. Gao, G. Gu, K. Hilburn, G.J. Huffman, D.P. Lettenmaier, W.T. Liu, F.R. Robertson, C.A. Schlosser, J. Sheffield, and E.F. Wood
 (2015). The observed state of the water cycle in the early 21st century. Journal of Climate, 28 (21), 1–80.

*An update:

Please also see this recent paper on Nature Geosciences, brought to my attention by Wuletawu Abera, on the groundwaters amount:

Gleeson, T., Befus, K. M., Jasechko, S., Luijendijk, E., & Cardenas, M. B. (2015). The global volume and distribution of modern groundwater. Nature Geoscience, 1–10. http://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2590


** A further update:

Zhang Y., PanM., Wood E.F., On Creating Global Gridded Terrestrial Water Budget Estimates from Satellite Remote Sensing, Surveys in Geophysics, DOI 10.1007/s10712-015-9354-y, 1-20, 2016

*** Yet another update

Bierkens, M. F. P. (2015), Global hydrology 2015: State, trends, and directions, Water Resour. Res., 51,4923–4947, doi:10.1002/2015WR017173.

Rejection of Rejection

Dear readers, if you are tired to have your paper rejected, you can consider the send this rejection of rejection letter, whose template has been published on BMJ journal (here) authored by  Cath Chapman and Tim Slade :

Rejection of rejection letter


[insert university emblem here]

Dear Professor [insert name of editor]

[Re: MS 2015_XXXX Insert title of ground-breaking study here]


Thank you for your rejection of the above manuscript.


Unfortunately we are not able to accept it at this time. As you are probably aware we receive many rejections each year and are simply not able to accept them all. In fact, with increasing pressure on citation rates and fiercely competitive funding structures we typically accept fewer than 30% of the rejections we receive. Please don’t take this as a reflection of your work. The standard of some of the rejections we receive is very high.
In terms of the specific factors influencing our decision the failure by Assessor 1 to realise the brilliance of the study was certainly one of them. Simply stating “this study is neither novel nor interesting and does not extend knowledge in this area” is not reason enough. This, coupled with the use of Latin quotes by Assessor 2, rendered an acceptance of your rejection extremely unlikely.
We do wish you and your editorial team every success with your rejections in the future and hope they find safe harbour elsewhere. To this end, may we suggest you send one to [insert name of rival research group] for consideration. They accept rejections from some very influential journals.

Please understand that our decision regarding your rejection is final. We have uploaded the final manuscript in its original form, along with the signed copyright transfer form.

We look forward to receiving the proofs and to working with you in the future.

Yours sincerely

Dr [insert name here]

[Insert research group acronym here]

[Insert university here]

[Insert country here—that is, Australia/New Zealand/small European Country/Canada]


Do not forget to look at the replays.

An overview of my research and my future envisioned work. My professorship talk

I was finally asked to do this talk, that cover my research experience, for my Full Professor appointment here at the Civil, Environmental and Mechanical Department of the University of Trento.  This the abstract:

In this talk I will cover, in brief, my last 25  years of research through my main contribution in surface hydrology, river network evolution, hyperresolution and travel-time modelling of hydrological processes, hydroinformatics. Life means “my academic life” but also some recent orientation I am taking to model the non linear interactions in the water cycle. These include plants and ecosystems, which I believe will be my next research objectives, which I will pursue with the use of my model infrastructure, based on evolving  GEOtop and JGrass-NewAGE.  I will talk a little, maybe, of thermodynamics,  hydro-informatics, and optimisation principles in natural processes (I see that I do not have a post, on this, I will do it). A little on Cryosphere processes will not be absent.

Clicking on the Figure, you will be linked to the slides of my talks (with links to literature). The talk, unfortunately is in Italian: but the slides are in English. Below, please find the youtube.

Age-ranked storage equations for river Adige

This below is the presentation that Maria Laura Bancheri is giving today at the AGU fall meeting. It summarises our recent work on travel time distributions theory (no contributions so far -well look at here -, but we tried to clarify concepts and mathematics) and its ongoing application to River Adige.

All this knowledge is going to flow into the great family of JGrass-NewAGE components and being used to assess age of water and tracer movements. 

Keep looking for upgrades.

Be prepared for Java 9

We still do not have digested Java 8 in our programming style and ( other new programming languages like Swift appear on the  stage, and others, like FORTRESS -se also Wikipedia-, die),  we have to face the new improvements of Java 9 (effective December 2016, but already at a fixed stage of development). They are a REPL called JShell and modularity.

This is a sequence of webcasts on this topic, directly from  protagonists, Mark Reinhold, and Alan Bateman

• Java 9 and beyond
• Modularity in Java 9
• A more wide set of webcast on the same topic

On the same topi, a 2016 issue of eMag. Finally, an interesting website here.

Economy, Water, Climate change. Methods and scale of analysis in economy.

This talk, of the CLIMAWARE project series, was given by Martina Sartori, a young economist, part of the group of the project. The talk was the occasion to exchange information about the type of models and the scale of modelling economists use to assess the impacts of variation of water availability on the economic system.

Click on the Figure to get the presentation.
I have to say that the discussion was interesting. The scale economists use is much larger than catchment scale, mostly because their models are parametrised on the knowledge of nations' exchanges more than regional ones. Model themselves seem not to be very complex from the mathematical point of view, but they treat thousands of parameters which makes them complicates. These parameters are collected by specialised companies and/or institutions by sorting out transactions among countries and looking at the global market. Probably the theoretical foundations of these models could not be so unassailable, but, however, they embeds a lot of empirical knowledge. For us was important to talk together.