Monday, October 31, 2022

The Po Project

 This is the presentation of the project I gave to the Po River Authority in Parma on last Monday. 


Slides can be found here

Thursday, October 20, 2022

My Water Management Methods in Agricolture (Class) - The lab

 Go to: The schedule

This blog post contains the material of the lab class which includes data, software and instructions on how to use it. 

Image from: K. Beven's Pantha Rei

2022-10-20  - QGIS and GIS

Slides
2022-11-03 - A quick introduction to QGIS
2022-11-10 - A quick introduction to QGIS
2022-12-15

Tuesday, October 18, 2022

My Water Management Methods in Agricolture (Class) - The Schedule

 Go to: The Lab

This post contains the material of the class of Water Management in Agricolture. The course is experimental and we are going to convey a lot of information. However, for this reason this page will be constantly under construction until the end of the course. 

Anticipations about the course can be found at:

- Ideas for a Course in Water Management for Agricolture

- Strumenti per la gestione dell'acqua dalla pianta al bacino


Image from: K. Beven's The still dynamics

Methods 

Classes will be held in English with the help of slides. Slides will be uploaded in advance on this OSF site.

All the video are actually uploaded to the VIMEO Showcase of the class

2022-10-19 - A little of information about the course and Introductions

Some generalities about Radiation

Radiation is the engine of all the water movement. These lessons give some basic information about what we have to account for when trying to estimate it. Reference to the Plank and Stefan-Boltzmann law is a necessary tribute to radiation physics without which nothing can be understood. 

2022-11- 12 - Water in soil and aquifers. Darcy-Buckingham. Hydraulic conductivity. Soil water retention curves (Storyboard2020)

Once precipitations arrive to the ground surface they either infiltrate or generate runoff. We first state how they infiltrate and, actually how water behave in the soil and in the ground. We talk about the complexity of the Earth surface that contains life and call it, the Critical Zone. To study infiltration we introduce the Darcy and Richards equations of which we explain the characteristics. 
2022-11-18

2022 - 11- 19
 - The Richardson-Richards equation  (Storyboard 2020, Storyboard2022_2, Storyboard2022_2_2)

Evaporation generalities (Storyboard2020)

A consistent part of root zone and surface water evaporates and returns to the atmosphere to eventually form clouds and precipitation again. The process follows quite complicate routes and is different when happening from liquid surfaces, soil or vegetation (and BTW animals).  In this group of lectures we try to figure out the physical mechanisms that act in the process and give some hint on methods to estimate evaporation and transpiration with physically based models. 

2022 - 12- 01 
2022 - 12- 07 - Differentiation evaporation and transpiration 

2022-12-14  - A very little of hydraulics (with an eye to irrigation) in two storyboards

 To irrigate well a little of hydraulic notions are needed. They re reduced here to the bare-bone. 
2022-12-15 - Irrigation

When irrigating ? Which infrastructures have to be implemented ? How to command and control irrigation ? Using the irrigation system smartly. 
2022-01-11
    References

    A. Capra and B. Scicolone - Progettazione e gestione degli impianti di irrigazione -Edagricole

    Nolz, R., et al. "Soil water monitoring in a vineyard and assessment of unsaturated hydraulic parameters as thresholds for irrigation management" Agricultural Water Management 164 (2016): 235-242

    Hardie, W. James, and Stephen R. Martin. "Shoot growth on de‐fruited grapevines: a physiological indicator
    for irrigation scheduling." Australian Journal of Grape and Wine Research 6.1 (2000): 52-58.

    Goodwin, Ian. Managing water stress in grape vines in Greater Victoria. Department of Primary Industries, (2002- updated 2009)

     Go to: The Lab

    Monday, October 17, 2022

    New USGS Water Cycle representation

    People says that this new representation includes anthropic action and this represent a new step in our consciousness (well, it was already present in Oki and Kanae, 2006).  Here it is the figure, a nice work of art indeed.


    The original comments are here: https://eos.org/articles/not-your-childhood-water-cycle

    Thursday, October 13, 2022

    Tools for supporting the management of water availability from the plant to the basin

    In the occasion of the 100 years of the Land Reclamation Italian Consortia a meeting is held in Trento where I was invited to talk. The content of my talk (I am supposed to talk to politicians, stakeholders and farmers) is below 



    The talk and the slides are in Italian.  However, what I was talking about is the use of hydrological modelling, supported by Earth Observations and ground measurements in order to manage more precisely crops and farms (at least from the water quantity point of view).