Winter School on the GEOframe system

The course for doctoral students, post docs and young researchers in Hydrology, Forestry, and related disciplines will cover the simulation of the hydrological cycle of catchments of various sizes with the GEOframe system. To know about GEOframe and GEOframe-NewAGE, please refer to here.

They say that all models are wrong but useful. However, with better tools you forecast and decide better.

The course will enroll at most thirty students and will be held at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Mechanical Engineering of Trento from January 8 to January 18 included.
The course will be of totally 68 hours (8 a day) of which 34 (4 each day) will be dedicated to laboratory and personal work under the supervision of tutors. The course includes as option to get an exam certification, upon the completion of an exercise, to have doctoral credits.

Subscription at: https://webmagazine.unitn.it/en/evento/dicam/44808/geoframe-newage-winter-school

Instructors

• Riccardo Rigon
• Michele Bottazzi
• Niccolò Tubini

with material prepared by

• Giovanna Dalpiaz
• Marialaura Bancheri

The  topics treated has been:

• Tuesday, January 8: Introduction to the course - What is OMS - What is GEOframe - Using Python and Jupyter for visualising Inputs and Outputs 
• Wednesday, January 9- Catchments and Hydrologic Response Units delineation 
• Thursday and Friday, January, 10 - 11 - Treatment of spatial data and Calibration  
• Monday January 14 - Estimation of radiation components 
• Tuesday, January 15 - Evaporation and Transpiration 
• Wednesday, January 16 - Rainfall-Runoff modelling with various NewAGE components 
• Thursday, January 17 - Rainfall-Runoff modelling with various NewAGE components 
• Friday, January 18 - Opinions on hydrological modelling. Exercises on assignments.
• Epilogue and thanks

Go to the first day

Why choosing GEOframe over other models/platforms ? I would say for:

• Flexibility: GEOframe is not a model but a system of components that interact at run-time. You can chose among various components options for any of the processes.
• Expandability: If you like to program, with a little investment in Java you can write your own component and make them to interact with the others without having to reinvent the wheel.
• Parallelism. Components work in parallel when their tasks do not interact, but this is transparent for you (we call it implicit parallelism). 
• Spatial discretisation. A catchment is subdivided in parts (HRU) which can be modeled separately and are computed in parallel. The network structure is used to achieve the spatial parallelism. Its spatial modularity can be used to add/cut part of the basins without having to redo the spatial analysis, for doing multisite calibration, to progress the analysis of a larger basin in parts that are assembled together eventually.
• Beyond-state-of art components.  Besides traditional approach to processes, we implemented a few new ideas for all the processes we covered.
• Reliability.  GEOframe is currently used for the flood forecasting in real time by Regione Basilicata. It is not just a system for research that does not work in real cases. 
• Tracers studies. Not treated in the school are present tools for doing tracers studies,
• Process based modelling.  Not treated in the school, we have tools for integrating Richards equation in 1D, and we are developing tools for integrating it in 2d and 3d coupling it with the energy budget. These components will be able to interact with the other. We also started new developments on freezing soil and snow modelling.

The cost of the course for early subscribers is 270 Euros which includes lunch and parsimonious coffee-breaks  Member of SII, The Italian hydrological Society have a discount of 20 Euros. Cost of late subscribers (after November 15, 2018) is 370 Euros. 

After November 15 some work will be required to participant in order to setup their tools for running GEOframe. Installation of Java (version 8), installation of the Object Modelling System console, Installation of Python and Python notebooks, testing the use of some file formats. After the accomplishment of the requirements, students will be allow to bring their own study cases at the School.

Who wants to have early information or clarifications can write to me: riccardo.rigon at unit.it. Subscription page at:

https://webmagazine.unitn.it/en/evento/dicam/44808/geoframe-newage-winter-school

Looking for financial support of a valuable research (to whom it may concern)

It happens that I browsed the presentation reporting about your flood initiative and asking for collaboration. I am a professor in hydrology and I am interested. 

During the last years, in collaboration with Dr Olaf David of Colorado State University, we worked to implement an infrastructure, called GEOframe upon the framework offered by the Object Modelling System (OMS) and the Cloud Service Integration platform ( CSIP) platform. GEOframe tools are  devoted to forecast floods, droughts, snow cover and any component of the hydrological cycle in a flexible, maintainable, expandable platform.

My efforts on flood forecasting (and this link too) brought to both theoretical and applicative achievements. The latter came through the implementation, since more than a decade ago of the various systems used by the Province of Trento for its purposes, and recently to the implementation of a system for the Civil protection of Regione Basilicata. 

Academic achievements include works on small catchments and large catchments with various uses of remote sensed data. My former student Giuseppe Formetta (GS), now working at CEH at Wallingfort, (actually on-leave at JRC for this year) is applying an early version of our system to the Khrisna river in India. 

The current system, using the analogy of the river network, schematises a catchments as a graph and implements such informatics that allows the run in parallel of subcatchments, separate calibration in preparatory phases and their assemblage a-posteriori  (Net3). 

My Ph.D. student, Francesco Serafin (graduating in Spring 2019), besides Net3, enhanced the OMS console by allowing binding OMS compliant components (written in Java, C++ or FORTRAN) with Python and R codes, getting, at the end, a very flexible system.

Therefore, I think I can be useful for the project and I would very appreciate if we can establish some collaboration. 

The Horton Machine (formerly known also as JGrasstools) is back

The Horton Machine, the set of tools I developed several years ago with Hydrologis, is now back and well documented in gvSIG. All the merit goes to Andrea Antonello and Silvia Franceschi, the "Hydrologissers'.  I could not support new work on GIS (after my decade of involvement) but they were so kind to make me co-author of their presentations. During the last FOSS4G in Guimãraes they presented what they ported into  gvSIG and prepared some illustrative material that we share with you.

You can find:

• The Introduction/presentation given in Guimãraes
• The material of the workshop given by Silvia and Andrea
• A quick introduction for the installation of the Horton Machine plugin
• The Tutorial
• The DEM the can be used as example

If you need more information about gvSIG, please go to its site or its YouTube channel (learning gvSIG in 30 minutes, here).

Categories of systems of equations in ODEs based hydrological systems

This is the continuation of the reservoirology topic saga.  Especially preparatory for understanding  is the Reservoirology #3 post. Here we show that the same topological structure of Petri Nets can address various physical concepts related to a hydrological system conceptualised as a set of reservoir and therefore solvable as a set of ODEs.
The main ODE system, however, does not reveal all of the system. A finer inspection can be obtained by investigating travel times and concentration of tracers (being the theoretical point of view, the first, the experimental one, the second).

To fix some concept we wrote the short presentations above. Or just click here. The pdf contains itself links to other posts and literature.