Evaporation and Transpiration

 Evaporation and transpiration are the topics more discussed in this blog, due to the interests I grew in the last few years (almost without publishing). However, I believe I collected enough information to be able to summarize a new view on these processes. Certainly shared with others, but not so widely shared, and not already present in other posts of this blog. In this presentation, that I shrinked in less than half an hour, I tried to summarize part of my current knowledge. For complimentary information, please see the lectures I gave at the GEOframe Winter School, or during the class of hydrology I do. 

The main result are a complete understanding of what the Penman-Monteith approach is, and that soil evaporation and transpiration can be differentiated from  the computational point of view because of the different dynamics of their energy and water budgets.

Mondays' Seminar at the Hydrological Modelling Course 2021

The Hydrological Modelling Class

• Introduction
• Software Used
• The Foreseen Schedule
• The lab 
• Seminars (you are already here)

All the seminars will be at 12:30 

• 26 Aprile 2021, Modelling Groundwaters and their contaminants in the Engineering of Aquifer and Contaminated sites   - by  Prof. Ing. Alberto Bellin, PhD, Università di Trento
• 3 Maggio 2021 - Working with Water and Snow - by Ing. Matteo Dall'Amico, PhD, MobyGIS
• 10 Maggio 2021 - Water and Irrigation - by  Ing. Marco Bezzi, PhD, Bluetentacles
• 17 Maggio 2021 - Process based models and modelling (Vimeo2021) - by Ing. Giacomo Bertoldi, PhD, EURAC Research
• 24 Maggio 2021 - The Management of water scarcity in the Adige River Basin (Vimeo2021) - by dott. Fabio Lazzeri, Distretto dei Bacini Idrografici del Nord Est
• 31 Maggio 2021 - Simplified DEM-based assessment tools for flood hazard assessment - by Ing. Attilio Castellarin (Vimeo2021), Università di Bologna

They are in Italian but if international participants will arrive they will be in English. Who is interested can write to abouthydrology <at> gmail.com to have access to the webinars.

Beyond Academic Research (BAR) Talks

The Beyond Academic Research (BAR) Talks are organized by the Young Hydrological Society - IT.  It was a excellent series of event in five webinars to bring young hydrologists or aspiring such  to know the world of hydrological opportunities in Italy as developed by small and medium business and the experience of other young researchers.  The YouTubeVideo are very interesting (unfortunately in Italian). It cannot escape to the attention to the reader that they suggest many possible ways of interactions between researchers and the "real world" of the profession of hydrologist in Italy. 

• BAR Talks - R&D in small and medium companies in Italy i
• BAR Talks - R&D in big multinationals companies
• BAR Talks -Young researchers experiences
• BAR Talks - Research Institution (Part I)
• BAR Talks - Research Institution (Part II)

The Italian National Water Budget on a grid: the BIGBANG project

The BIG BANG project is a valuable project by ISPRA that aims to get the water budget all over Italy on a grid of 1 square kilometer at monthly time scale. Particularly valuable is the operation done to collect the sources of data necessary and, obviously, the operation itself was absolutely necessary in absence of any other Italian (global) initiative. Despite I have some criticism on the methods used, BIG BANG represents certainly a milestone with which all the new works that pretend to be done have to confront

I think it is clear even to the researchers that did it that any single aspect of the work can be improved if compared to the current state of art of hydrology. I dare to say that this budget could be done at daily scale, with better modelling tools, with more organised data and provided as a service to the community on demand. This does not diminishes the effort the Authors did but instead ask for proper financial support, maybe financed by the new PNRR, to provide appropriate open databases of the hydrological and environmental quantities necessary for the analyses, appropriate models, and all it is required, including an open approach in which all the actors (see for instance, Martinengo et al., 2021) can play their role. Personally I think the GEOframe/OMS3 infrastructure could help a lot in this process. I have a conflict of interest in saying it but is is so true that it cannot be left an untold story.  

You can find the report of the project (in Italian) by clicking on the figure. You can also watch the seminar recently held by BIG BANG Authors on YouTube

The GEOframe system: a modular, expandible, open-source system for doing hydrology by computer according to the open science paradigms.

GEOframe is a system for doing hydrology  by computer. It has been designed to be open for doing open science. This is the two minutes presentation given at the vEGU 2021, session EOS 5.3 - The evolving open-science landscape in geosciences: open data, software, publications and community initiatives.

There are other good tools around but we believe GEOframe is special for its design and flexibility.  We are not telling very much about GEOframe here though. Comprehensive information can be obtained by browsing the material of the last GEOframe Winter School. A shorter introduction, yet not exhaustive can be for here (link to be added). By clicking on the above figure, please get the slides of the presentation below. 

Finally my guys have chosen Gmsh

Since we are finally going productive in solving equations in 2D or 3D, we needed a mesh generator. We were using various tools, because meshing actually is a widespread need. However none of the previous tools used was satisfactory for a reason or another. Finally it looks like we have found what we were looking for in Gmsh. It is open source and in C++ which make it quite readable for us (if we ever need to go into the code). 

"Gmsh is an open source 3D finite element mesh generator with a built-in CAD engine and post-processor. Its design goal is to provide a fast, light and user-friendly meshing tool with parametric input and advanced visualization capabilities. Gmsh is built around four modules: geometry, mesh, solver and post-processing. The specification of any input to these modules is done either interactively using the graphical user interface, in ASCII text files using Gmsh's own scripting language (.geo files), or using the C++, C, Python or Julia Application Programming Interface (API).

See this general presentation for a high-level overview of Gmsh and recent developments, the screencasts for a quick tour of Gmsh's graphical user interface, and the reference manual for a more thorough overview of Gmsh's capabilities, some frequently asked questions and the documentation of the C++, C, Python and Julia API.

The source code repository contains many examples written using both the built-in script language and the API (see e.g. the tutorials and the and demos)."

Saving Water Growing Crops - A M.S. Thesis by Nicola D'Alberton

Climate change will affect the groundwater availability in the next decades and impose new challenges to save water in agriculture. 

The project Saving Water Growing Crops takes place in a rural mountain area of Lebanon and is focused on promoting a new efficient smart irrigation technology and the rehabilitation of three rainwater harvesting reservoirs (ponds). This could lead to significant water savings, and thus increase the resilience of the communities to climate change. 

The present study aims to analyse and map the situation in the target area, to model the current situation and design different scenarios to estimate the benefits given by the different project solutions.

Further developments are discussed to obtain more reliable model to represent the processes and evaluate the efficiency of the intervention.  

The results showed that the implementation of the smart irrigation technology and the rehabilitation of the catchment system of the ponds may save a significant amount of water limiting the dependency on groundwater. Please find the thesis manuscript by clicking on the Figure above.