Thursday, January 30, 2020

Hydrological Modelling 2020

The Hydrological Modeling course aims to teach to simulate the hydrological cycle at various spatial scales in order to be able to adequately manage the water resource and to prevent the risk of floods. The importance of these two issues is widely covered by the EU 2000/60 framework directives or "Water directive" and EU 2006/60, "Flood directive". Based on the hydrological knowledge acquired in the course of Hydrology at the Bachelor of Engineering for the Environment and the Territory, the hydrological processes, analyzed as punctual phenomena are extended to the water catchment areas. 
Precipitation is analyzed as a measured statistical data, both from ground stations and from remote sensing; the other processes are suitably modeled, as briefly described below. At the end of the course, a student must be able to independently model the flow rates, evaporation and transpiration in a river basin of various sizes, after having delineated it starting from digital terrain data. Of course, the student will have to demonstrate that he has critically understood the concepts that underlie the hydrological modeling presented. 
The knowledge acquired may be used in the River Engineering course for the design of defense works. Hydrological modeling also introduces concepts that are used in the course of Aqueducts and Sewers for the calculation of stormwater networks. The course is partly useful for the Hydraulic Protection of the Territory course.  
A more condensed part of the version of the course can be found @GWS2020.













Methods


The lectures of the course will be held in English, according to the methods already followed in the Numerical Modeling course (i.e. with summary in Italian at the beginning of the lesson, lessons in English, questions and explanations in Italian). The first part of the course, until on April 3, will be dedicated to the presentation and discussion of theoretical concepts. The lectures will be recorded and uploaded on the course's YouTube channel (or Vimeo). The lessons will cover 4 of the five hours per week. The fifth hour will be dedicated to the preparation of the data necessary for the projects to be completed in the second part of the course. 

Students must take care to understand the hydrological concepts and discuss them with the lecturer. The first twenty minutes of each lesson will be devoted to the discussion of the topics covered in the previous lesson and the problems that arose in the preparation of the data (in Italian). Every group had to prepare an appropriate question or comment to which the lecturer will replay. A summary, again in Italian, of the lesson and then the actual lesson will follow. 
The second part of the course will use the theoretical themes of the first part and using the tools made available by the GEOframe system (https://abouthydrology.blogspot.com/2015/03/jgrass-newage-essentials.html). Students, in groups of two or three, will have to estimate hydrological flows and quantities over a significant period of time and with an hourly time step using a time series of hydro-meteorological data in inputs for period long enough to allow adequate calibration of the models. With the help of the tutor and the reader, students will face problems of missing data, validate the models, discuss and implement an adequate configuration of the GEOframe hydrological system in order to get the hydrological water balance of the basin. At the end they will also have to calculate and discuss the discharges n a closure section of the chosen basin, in the event of a rainfall stress with an assigned rainfall return time of 10, 100 and 300 years. Part of the work is the estimation of forecast errors.

Used Software

There is no engineering without using models. During the class will be used various open source softwares and resources:
All these resources are free, besides being open. For installations requirements, please see the GEOframe winter school material here. For understanding a little more about this material, please look at "Getting started with Docker OMS and Jupyterlab" post.

Material of the course (other than indexed here)

The material of the course will be uploaded usually at this OSF site.

Exams

At the end of the first part of the course, an intermediate test will verify the theoretical / conceptual knowledge acquired by the student through three open-ended questions. These questions will be a random selection among a group of questions presented after the classes and that students will have them available before the test. The evaluation of the second part of the course consists in the discussion and presentation of the elaborated hydrological project of which the inputs, the outputs discussed through appropriate Jupyter notebooks must be delivered, accompanied by the necessary discussions, graphs and spatial maps. The formulation of the final grade will also assess the quality of the interaction of the groups with the tutor and the students, as well as the formal quality of the papers (appropriate use of the graphics, the Italian language -though the use of English will be allowed- and setting of the papers).

Foreseen Schedule (up to Easter)


(boldface dates are those with definitive material,
I or directly written in Italian  in for Italian,  unspecified for English. All slides are in English)

Lab material here

2020-03-03 - Syllabus - Introduction 2 Hydrological Modelling - Illustrating the catchments for the lab.
2020-03-05 - Discussion of previous lesson topics. Riassunto della lezione in Italiano. (This will be always done, each lesson, but for now on omitted). The rational of introducing these concepts  is that catchments are spatially extended and in this course we are interested to deal with catchments hydrology. So this first part is:
2020-03-10 -  Introduction to Geomorphometry II  (Storyboard 2020 in Italiano):


2020-03-12 -  This lecture, assumed that now you have at least the concepts of what a catchment is and theoretically you know how to extract it and subdivide it in parts, now you have to deal with the data to drive its hydrology. Because catchments have a spatial distribution, then also the driving data must be distributed. We need therefore methods of interpolation. Hydrological data (Storyboard2020 in Italian)

2020-03-17 - Hydrological Models. This is a class about hydrological models, so what are they ?
2020-03-19 - We do concentrate on such hydrological models that are made up of systems of Ordinary differential equations (ODEs). We give here some examples of HDS (Storyboard2020 in Italiano)
2020-03-24 Other more complicated models (Storyboard2020)
  • Here below we started a little series of lectures about a statistical way of seeing water movements in catchments. This view has a long history but recently had a closure with the work of Rinaldo, Botter and coworkers. Here it is presented an alternative vie to their concepts. Some passages could be of some difficulty but the gain in understanding the processes of fluxes formation at catchment scale is, in my view, of great value and deserves some effort.  The way of thinking is the following: a) the overall catchments fluxes are the sum of the movements of many small water volumes (molecules); b) the water of molecules can be seen through 3 distributions: the travel time distribution, the residence time distribution and the response time distributions; c) the relationships between these distributions are revealed; d) the relation of these distributions with the the treatment of the catchments made through ordinary differential equations is obtained through the definition of age ranked distributions; e) The theory this developed is a generalizations of the unit hydrograph theory. 
2020-03-26 -  Continuing the mechanical-statistical view of the catchments (Storyboard2020)
2020-04-2 Flipped Lecture - We need radiation too. The topic is very boring (or technical?) but necessary to who want to do evapotranspiration and snow. After all radiation moves it all.
2020-04-07 -  
2020-04-09 -  Snow modelling equations and models
Extra material

Seminars

  • Matteo Dall'Amico (MobyGIS), La modellazione della neve in ambito professionale
  • Alberto Bellin,  Gli inquinanti negli acquiferi e la loro gestione (Vimeo2020)
  • Marco Bezzi (BlueTentacles),  La gestione dell'irrigazione nell'agricoltura del futuro (Vimeo2020)

Lab material is here


References

The lessons will be video recorded and made available. Each lesson will be given through slides in English which will be delivered to students in advance. When necessary, the lessons will be accompanied by appropriate in-depth papers. There is no real text because the course, even in the hydrological tradition, elaborates the concepts in a contemporary way and uses innovative tools.
As general reference texts we recommend:

  • Beven, K. - Raifall-runoff, the primer, ISBN 10: 047071459X, ISBN 13: 978047071459, Second Edition, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012
  • Dingmann, L., Physical Hydrology, ISBN-13: 978-1478611189, ISBN-10: 1478611189, Third Edition, Waveland Press, 2015
  • Lu, N. and Godt, J.W., Hillslope Hydrology and Stability, Cambridge University Press, ISBN-13: 978-1107021068, ISBN-10: 11070210652010, 2013
  • Bonan, G., Ecological Climatology, concepts and applications, ISBN-13: 978-1107619050, ISBN-10: 110761905X, 2016

These books represent a shareable review of the phenomena and hydrological modeling but the methods they present are not necessarily those used in the course. The course, cause of time constraints, presents a selected and limited perspective of the subject that the texts cited dissect from various points of view often complementary to the one of the course.

The Hydrology Class 2020

To have an idea about this class, please look at the Syllabus slides below.  This year the class will be 90% similar to the one of the last year.  Laboratory work will be (mostly) concentrated in May and June. March and April up to Easter will be mostly spent to develop the theoretical parts.
Lectures  and lab classes will be recorded and uploaded on my YouTube channel.
The intermediate exam will be written with 3 questions about the topic treated to which the student will be asked to answer with text, figures and formulas. The final exam will be a discussion of the exercises provided by the students int the form of Jupyter notebooks plus a short Python exercise. Each of the exercises will be discussed separately and by booking an appointment with the professor before the formal date of the exam or at the day of the final exam. The touch-screen at the first floor of the Mesiano building  will be used for the presentations.

This Hydrology class aims to explain the physics (meaning the mathematical equations and their phenomenology) and, in some cases, their statistics (i.e. the distribution) of the basic hydrological processes (precipitation, runoff, infiltration, evaporation and transpiration)
Students will be required to: being able to derive and comment the hydrological equations above mentioned and to do some statistics on hydrological data. Particular attention will be dedicated to the derivation of the statistics of extreme rainfall.

They will learn how to delineate a catchment for digital elevation models through some appropriate tools. Besides students will be requested to get some basics of the tools that will be used to estimate the hydrological fluxes (using a GIS, Python, and other tools, among those in GEOframe).
They will be required to be able, by means of some models provided by the instructors the main hydrological fluxes and represent them at catchment scale.

This is intended to serve as a basis for getting further knowledge and
  • prevent, manage, control floods, landslides and snow-avalanches
  • manage irrigation
  • estimate water availability for hydropower production
  • forecast roads freezing
  • estimate soil, roads, or snow temperature
  • forecast snow water equivalent and snow height
Assuming that the student will take a master in Environmental Engineering at Trento University, Acquedotti e fognature, Modelli idrologici, Ingegneria fluviale, are classe that request the knowledge communicate in this Hydrology class. 


The first part of the course, until April 3, will be dedicated to the presentation and discussion of theoretical concepts through lectures that will be videotaped and uploaded on the course's YouTube channel (or Vimeo). The lessons will cover 4 of the five hours per week. The fifth hour will be devoted to simple exercises with Python and Jupyter lab and to the preparation of the data necessary for the projects to be completed in the second part of the course in groups of two or three students.
The student must take care to understand the hydrological concepts and discuss them with the lecturer. The first twenty minutes of each lesson will be devoted to the discussion of the topics covered in the previous lesson. Each group will have to prepare one question or comment to which the teacher will answer. A summary of the lesson will follow, followed by the actual lesson. The second part of the course will take up the theoretical themes of the first part and using the tools made available to the GEOframe system. Students, in groups of two or three, will have to:
  • Analyze a series of rainfall and hydro-meteorological data with the use of Python 
  • Estimate the intensity-duration-frequency curves with the methods presented in the first part of the course using the data of a hydro-meteorological gauge station
  • Design, under the supervision of the tutor and the teacher, and run some infiltration simulations in complex soils and discuss the results.
  • Design, under the supervision of the tutor and the teacher, and perform the calculation of evaporation and perspiration in a chosen site

Used Software

There is no engineering without using models. During the class will be used various open source softwares and resources:
All these resources are free, besides being open. For installations requirements, please see the GEOframe winter school material here. For understanding a little more about this material, please look at "Getting started with Docker OMS and Jupyterlab" post.

Lab material can be found here
Lab material of the last year can be found here

Foreseen Schedule

Material uploaded is subject to modifications prior to the schedule date

2020-02-26

2020-03-05  - Ground based Precipitations and their statistics Separation snow-rainfall - measure of precipitation
2020-03-11  Extreme precipitations (Storyboard2020)
Determination of Gumbel's parameters
2020-03-13 Extreme precipitations part 2. (Storyboard2020)

2020-03- 18 - Water in soil and aquifers. Darcy-Buckingham. Hydraulic conductivity. Soil water retention curves (Storyboard2020)
2020-03-20
2020 - 03- 25  - The Richards equation  (Storyboard 2020)
2020-03-27 - Flipped Class on some topics of Soil and Groundwater
    2020-04-01 - Runoff Generation (Summary 2020)
    Q&A - Runoff

    2020-04-03 - Surface flow
          Evaporation generalities
    2020-04-08 - Evaporation from soils and Transpiration (Storyboard2020)
    Questions for the intermediate examinations

    References

    The lessons will be video recorded and made available. Each lesson will be given through slides in English which will be delivered to students in advance. When necessary, the lessons will be accompanied by appropriate in-depth articles. There is no real text because the course, even when it is fully in the hydrological tradition, elaborates the concepts in a contemporary way and uses innovative tools.

    As general reference texts we recommend:
    • Bras, R.L, An introduction to Hydrologic Science, ISBN-13: 978-0201059229, 1989 - ISBN-10: 0201059223, Addison-Wesley (July 1, 1989)
    • Brutsaert, W., Hydrology: an introduction, ISBN-13: 978-0521824798 - ISBN-10: 0521824796, Cambridge University Press, 2005
    • Dingmann, L., Physical Hydrology, ISBN-13: 978-1478611189, ISBN-10: 1478611189, Third Edition, Waveland Press, 2015
    • Freeze, A. ; Cherry, J., Groundwater, 1979
    • Lu, n. and Godt, J.W., Hillslope Hydrology and Stability, Cambridge University Press, ISBN-13: 978-1107021068, ISBN-10: 11070210652010, 2013

    These books represent a shareable review of phenomena and hydrological modeling but the methods they present are not necessarily those used in the course. The course, also for reasons of time, presents a selected and limited perspective of the subject that the texts cited dissect from various points of view.

    Lab material   can be found here

    Friday, January 24, 2020

    Material of the Winter School 2020 on GEOframe

    All the material of the GEOframe Winter School 2020 (GSW2020) is now ready on the GEOframe blog. Yo can have the software, the instructions for installation, a glimpse of theory of the hydrological processes, the examples, the Jupyter notebooks, etc.
    Those who where not present can still enjoy our efforts by browsing the material by clicking on the picture above or by clicking the items below:
    Who is just interested in the theoretical lectures, they can enjoy the videos listed at this blog page.
    Who is interested in self teaching with the material is welcomed. We are committed to moderately help GEOframe users.
    Who is interested to have the original of the slides (not just the pdf) can write to riccardo.rigon <at> unitn.it.
    Who is interested to gain a certificate or ECTS credits on GEOframe and have responsive support, please write to abouthydrology <at> gmail.com.
    Who is interested to do a Ph.D. with us is suggested to study this material and performing an appropriate exercise under our guidance (see also here) please also contact us.

    Monday, January 20, 2020

    Video Lectures on Hydrology

    I am collecting here my video lectures on Hydrology (in my broken English). These are mostly part of the two GEOframe Winter School held in 2019 and 2020 and from a Summer School on Landslides made a few years ago. Since video lectures on these topics are uncommon, I think it is useful to index them.  I also invite anyone who has similar contributions to share them. I will be happy to add them to my list here.

    Here they are below subdivided by arguments with their companion slides:

    Catchments Delineation and Geomorphometry

    Data Interpolation with Kriging 

    Richards equation
    Radiation for Hydrologists
    Evaporation and Transpiration
    Hydrological Dynamical Systems  (a.k.a. lumped hydrological rainfall-runoff models) 
    Other resources

    • Other Videos, that I am providing for my Hydrological Modelling Class are here.
    • Video collected by Kevin McGuire (GS) are here.


    If you do not want to be just a tourist, you can go deeper and exercise with  Jupyter lab and GEOframe. For the latter, please see the material of the GWS2020. To anyone requesting, I can provide the original slides.

    Wednesday, January 15, 2020

    Thursday, January 2, 2020

    The estimation of the discharge through the IUH explained

    Time to time I go back to the estimation of the discharge through the Instantaneous Unit Hydrograph theory (IUH). It is interesting that this almost 90 year old concept is still alive and, being threathened by the studies on residence time from the physical point of view, is still valid when operational  activities are involved, and, in any case, as a benchmark tool.
    IUH is at the core of our analysis of peak flows and of the code called PeakFlow in the Horton Machine, and it is known that the concept can include geomorphic characteristics. Many then can be interested in knowing how to estimate it and the manuscript you can access in Authorea, gives a definitive guide to do it.
    The manuscript, can be found here.