Recent advances in big data machine learning in Hydrology

Chaopeng Shen (GS) of Penn State is organizing a series of Cyberseminars for CUASHI about Machine Learning in Hydrology.

Recently big data machine learning has led to substantial changes across many areas of study. In Hydrology, the introduction of big data and machine learning methods have substantially improved our ability to address existing challenges and encouraged novel perspectives and new applications. These advances present new opportunities methods that aid scientific discovery, data discovery, and predictive modeling. This series cover new techniques and findings that have emerged in Hydrology during the previous year, with a focus on catchment and land surface hydrology.

The announcement on the CUASHI site is here.

All talks take place on Fridays at 1:00 p.m. ET: Registration is free! You must register for the series in order to attend. To register, click here.

This is the foreseen schedule:

• March 29, 2019: Machine Learning & Information Theory for Land Model Benchmarking & Process Diagnostics | Grey Nearing, University of Alabama
• April 5, 2019: Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks for rainfall-runoff modeling | Frederik Kratzert, Johannes Kepler University
• April 12, 2019: Use deep convolutional neural nets to learn patterns of mismatch between a land surface model and GRACE satellite | Alex Sun, University of Texas at Austin
• April 19, 2019: Long-term projections of soil moisture using deep learning and SMAP data with aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty estimates | Chaopeng Shen, Pennsylvania State University
• April 26, 2019: Exploring deep neural networks to retrieve rain and snow in high latitudes using multi-sensor and reanalysis data | Guoqiang Tang, Tsinghua University
• May 3, 2019: Multioutput neural networks for estimating flow-duration curves in ungaged catchments | Scott Worland, Cornell University and USGS
• May 10, 2019: Remote sensing precipitation using artificial neural networks and machine learning methods | Kuolin Hsu, University of California, Irvine

See also this special issue on Water

CUASHI ciber-seminars

For who do not, CUASHI stands for  Consortium of University for the Advancement of Hydrological sciences. The institution is a source of many good initiatives, among which, the hydrologic information system (HIS), a cyber-infrastructure for storing and distributing data.  However, one of the activity of CUASHI is covering with cyberseminars (more than one hundred so far) many aspects of hydrological research and practice.

Following the link you will findthe whole serie of seminar, in alphabetic order.  Out of them I chose ten, not necessarily the best, but those that have attracted my attention. All of them are the product of first class hydrologist, whose publication and studies deserve, in any case, attention. Here they are:

Bode, Collin - University of California, Berkeley
HydroWatch: An Open source Sensor Observatory
Recorded presentation

DeLuca, Cecelia - National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
ESMF and Earth System Curator: Integrated Modeling Infrastructure for Virtual Communities
Recorded presentation

Marks, Danny - USDA ARS, Northwest Watershed Research Center
An Outdoor Hydro-Climatic Laboratory for the 21st Century: 45 Years of Research and Data Collection at the Reynolds Creek Experimental Watershed
Recorded presentation

Molotch, Noah – Research at the Western Critical Zone Observatories
Snowmelt as a Driver of Ecohydrological Processes: Low-hanging Fruit for Cross-CZO Research
Recorded presentation

Pomeroy, John - University of Saskatchewan
Advancing Hydrological Processes to Better Predict Hydrology in Cold Regions
Recorded presentation

Selker, John - Oregon State University
Methods in Hydrologic Science: The Synergies between Redundant Low-cost Wireless Sensors and the Data Cloud Come of Age
Recorded presentation

Smith, Jim - Princeton University
Flooding in the Urban Environment
Recorded presentation

Tarboton, David & David R. Maidment - Utah State University & University of Texas, Austin
State and Regional Hydrologic Information Systems
Recorded presentation

Vogel, Richard - Tufts University
Hydromorphology: The Shape of our Water Future
Recorded presentation

Wagener, Thorsten - Pennsylvania State University
Hydrologic Similarity and the Search for a Catchment Classification Framework
Recorded presentation

CUAHSI youtube and the recent conferences at the biennial meeting

CUAHSI is the consortium of Universities for the advancement of hydrological sciences (my university is a member). Every two years they have a very interesting meeting. I was invited to participate to the 2008 meeting, and I could not attend in 2010 and 2012. However, the plenary sessions are now on-line thanks to CUAHSIyoutube.  This year the main talks were by
Roger Pielke (Policy Relevant Science)

Tom Dunne  (The Evolution of Floodplain complexity)

Soroosh Sorooshian (Hydrological Forecasting over time and space scales)

Have a nice listening to.

Challenges and Opportunities for the Hydrological Sciences

From Anne Jefferson blog:





"The “blue book” has been updated and you can read and download a pre-publication PDF on the National Academies’ website for free. I’ve just been listening to a CUAHSI webinar summarizing the report, and I was please to see that a lot of the questions I’m interested in were highlighted by the committee that updated the report. For instance, there was specific mention of urban hydrology (and how changes to flowpaths and quantity alter water quality), the co-evolution of hydrology, landscapes, and life, and the need to understand the controls on the low flow extent of streams. I’ll be reading sections of this report in coming months, and if you want to get a sense of the state of hydrologic science, you would probably do well to start here too"

I will probably join Anne's efforts in reading the report.