Miles Traer - It is time for superheores to be environmentally concerned ;-)

I could not do it, to go to New Orleans Fall Meeting this year (but we had a couple of presentations). 

Among others, ut came to my attention a funny session entitled: PA13C Science and Sci-Fi: Using Real Science to Explore Fictional Worlds Posters, with which is nice to begin the series od 2018 posts.

The argument is made to attract attention on Climate Change and Earth Sciences, and have some fun in doing it (see here the Washington Post report)

A couple of poster of the session are available: the first one by the Convener, Traer himself analizes the energy requirements of some superheroes and you can see  the poster in the figure above. His arguments remind me the history of the banned superheroes in The Incredibles. 

The science below is kind of weak because you have to do some violation of physics (at least the known one) since the beginning when you accept that they can exist (but see the celebrate Kakalios book which takes another route to is), and actually many concerns can be raised on calculation (Geoscientists are nerds too). 

A second poster of some interest is the Engelman and Chure’s one concerned about T-Rex and Godzilla.

Miles Traer’s blog is nice to visit too, either for the comics and the rest.  

Estimating water budgets with JGrass-NewAGE

We already talked about water budgets, and the papers of ours that deals with it (see below). Because in this Fall AGU meeting there was a dedicated session, we presented an abstract:

Recently we presented two papers one dedicated to the estimation of the water budget components in a small, basin, the Posina catchment [Abera et al., 2017], and the other in a large basin, the Blue Nile [Abera et al., 2017b]. Closing the budget in the two cases was different. Worth to say, it was much more difficult to close the budget at Posina, since at the large scale satellite platform can reasonably help to validate the results. At the smallest scale ground measurements usually available do not guarantee the closure of the budget without making additional hypothesis and remote sensing data cannot give very much help.  The hypothesis that we made is that the groundwater storage comes back to the initial level after a certain time, that we called Budyko time, TB. This time can be fixed arbitrarily, for instance, to five years and then varied to assess, through these trials the uncertainty of the budget. The large scale case was largely supported by remote sensing data, instead, either for calibration and/or validation. This contribution explains how we actually did, clarifies some aspects of the informatics necessary to obtain it and openly discusses the issues risen in our work. We also consider varying configuration of the water budget schemes at the subbasin level, and how this affects the estimates.

Finally we analyse the problem of travel times [e.g. Rigon et  al., 2016a, Rigon et al, 2016b]  as it comes out from considering the multiple fluxes and storages and discuss how much they can be realistic. All considerations and  simulations are based on the JGrass-NewAGE system [Formetta et al., 2014] and its evolution presented in Bancheri [2017].

As we say in the presentation, we could not talk about the travel times. However there are several other places where you can find about, here. 

Clicking on the above Figure, you will see the presentation that was used in NewOrleas. However, on Youtube, we uploaded an extended version with comments. 

References

Abera, W., Formetta, G., Borga, M., & Rigon, R. (2017). Estimating the water budget components and their variability in a pre-alpine basin with JGrass-NewAGE. Advances in Water Resources, 104, 1–18. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.advwatres.2017.03.010

Abera, W., Formetta, Brocca, L., & Rigon, R. (2017), Modelling the water budget of the Upper Blue Nile basin using the JGrass-NewAge model system and satellite data. Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 21, 3145–3165, 2017

Rigon, R., Bancheri, M., & Green, T. R. (2016). Age-ranked hydrological budgets and a travel time description of catchment hydrology. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 20(12), 4929–4947. http://doi.org/10.5194/hess-20-4929-2016

On Complex Network Representation and Computation of Hydrological Quantities

Francesco Serafin participated for us to the AGU fall meeting presenting part of his work. They gave him a poster, actually the poster whose image is below. It is about the representation of Hydrological models as a network of interactions.

You can access a more readable version of the poster by clicking on the Figure. A similar, more recent presentation, given for IEMSS 2018 at Fort Collins can be found below: