A flexible approach to the estimation of water budgets and its connection to the travel time theory

This blogpost contains the Marialaura Bancheri (in this blog) dissertation for ending her doctoral studies. There is a lot of material inside that goes from how to do better hydrological models,  to doing it, to implement and deploys some OMS3 components.  Really a lot of material.

Clicking on the figure above, you can access the draft of the manuscript uploaded on Zenodo.  Here below, please find the Abstract of the manuscript:

Abstract

The increasing impacts of climate changes on water related sectors are leading the scientists' attentions to the development of comprehensive models, allowing better descriptions of the water and solute transport processes. "Getting the right answers for the right reasons", in terms of hydrological response, is one of the main goals of most of the recent literature. Semi-distributed hydrological models, based on the partition of basins in hydrological response units (HRUs) to be connected, eventually, to describe a whole catchment, proved to be robust in the reproduction of observed catchment dynamics. 'Embedded reservoirs' are often used for each HRU, to allow a consistent representation of the processes. In this work, a new semi-disitrbuted model for runoff and evapotranspiration is presented: five different reservoirs are inter-connected in order to capture the dynamics of snow, canopy, surface flow, root-zone and groundwater compartments.
The knowledge of the mass of water and solute stored and released through different outputs (e.g. discharge, evapotranspiration) allows the analysis of the hydrological travel times and solute transport in catchments. The latter have been studied extensively, with some recent benchmark contributions in the last decade. However, the literature remains obscured by different terminologies and notations, as well as model assumptions are not fully explained. The thesis presents a detailed description of a new theoretical approach that reworks the theory from the point of view of the hydrological storages and fluxes involved. Major aspects of the new theory are the 'age-ranked' definition of the hydrological variables, the explicit treatment of evaporative fluxes and of their influence on the transport, the analysis of the outflows partitioning coefficients and the explicit formulation of the 'age-ranked' equations for solutes. Moreover, the work presents concepts in a new systematic and clarified way, helping the application of the theory.
To give substance to the theory, a small catchment in the prealpine area was chosen as an example and the results illustrated.
The rainfall-runoff model and the travel time theory were implemented and integrated in the semi-distributed hydrological system JGrass-NewAge. Thanks to the environmental modelling framework OMS3, each part of the hydrological cycle is implemented as a component that can be selected, adopted, and connected at run-time to obtain a user-customized hydrological model. The system is flexible, expandable and applicable in a variety of modelling solutions.
In this work, the model code underwent to an extensive revision: new components were added (coupled storages water budget, travel times components); old components were enhanced (Kriging, shortwave, longwave, evapotranspiration, rain-snow separation, SWE and melting components); documentation was standardized and deployed.
Since the Thesis regards in wide sense the building of a collaborative system, a discussion of some general purpose tools that were implemented or improved for supporting the present research is also presented. They include the description and the verification of a software component dealing with the long-wave radiation budget and another component dealing with an implementation of some Kriging procedure.

OMS 3 essentials

OMS3 stands for Object Modelling System version 3 (see also this page here). Now it has also a server-side companion called Cloud Service Integration platform, CSIP. You can find information about OMS3 here:

• A brief introduction to the Object Modelling System (YouTube video). 
• OMS User Manual - Introduction (pdf, epub) 

The rational for a components-based modelling system can be found here 

A version of OMS3 source code is here.

For more general information you can browse the various dedicated posts in this blog.

For running it, you have to perform various installations. If can go to to the easiest path provided by 

• the GEOframe blog

Otherwise, if you prefer to go through all the details, give a look  to the short notes below. 

• Java. GEOframe and OMS are written in Java and they require to have installed Java on your computer. Here you can find instructions to install Java on your computer. OMS need Java 8 JDK. Please note that you need the Java Development Toolkit (JDK) installed not the Java Runtime Environment (JRE). The official Oracle's pages are here but we now want to use AdoptOpenJDK (see why here). Recently, for simplify these installations,  and the companion installations of the system GEOFrame built upon OMS3, we have used the Anaconda Environment, here. 

There are various ways to use OMS. The most important two are using Docker or using the OMSConsole (the latter is not really up-to-date). Please notice that the OMS console still works for Java 8, while the Docker version can work with the most recent Java version (this does not implies that your OMS components work with it, if they contain some dependence on old Java versions).

• The Docker way. Therefore you need to install it (here for Linuxes) on your computer. To quickly understand what Docker is, you can see here. Or read this tutorial. This video could be useful too. The knowledge of Docker required will be extremely elementary. You will not be required to do Docker applications. You simply use one and, at the end, is just matter of executing a command. The Docker hub for OMS is at https://hub.docker.com/r/omslab/oms/. Please check also the trouble shooting pages. using docker, usually, makes available the most recent version of the software. The CSIP Docker tools are at https://hub.docker.com/u/omslab
• The Console way. The OMS system installation traditional information can be found here: https://alm.engr.colostate.edu/cb/wiki/16961 and https://alm.engr.colostate.edu/cb/wiki/17107. 
• For geeks, OMS and CSIP are available at maven central: https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/edu.colostate.omslab (never tried so far). 

References

• David, O., Ascough, J. C., II, Lloyd, W., Green, T. R., Rojas, K. W., Leavesley, G. H., & Ahuja, L. R. (2012). A software engineering perspective on environmental modeling framework design: The Object Modeling System. Environmental Modelling and Software, 39, 1–13. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2012.03.006

To have a recent overview of the subject jointly with our GEOframe stuff, one can also give a look to 

• Marialaura Bancheri's dissertation (Mostly on application within GEOframe)
• Francesco Serafin dissertation (On various structural things about OMS3)

Further information

Our development regarding the Net3 (Francesco Serafin's work): https://alm.engr.colostate.edu/cb/repository/24720 

Hopefully they will merge soon in an official release. All the "alm" repo at present require a password that can be asked to Olaf David (odavid <at> colostate. edu) col.

Some About the World Bank Actions related to Water Resources

One former University of Trento student who eventually moved to Cambridge, Anna Cestari, is since many years working for the World Bank. Having the occasion to have her Trento, I asked her to give a seminar on the activities and the projects of the World Bank. What she said for the general activities is actually what is also summarised in the World Bank Brochure. 

 However, she gave also talked a little about the Virtual Water problems, how much is water demand of Agricoluture, and some other details about what she finds in developing countries. Water availability has so large implications for any of us and our society. Certainly Global Hydrological Models, or regional ones, can help to sort out the numbers  that are required to build the statistics she presented, and to build infrastructures with informed data.

The four hours rule

I link here an article from the Guardian by Oliver Bukerman, in Italy reproduced by Internazionale dedicated to the quantity of creative work that can be done every day. He, in turn, takes inspiration from the Alex Pang's book Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less.
The original article can be found here. The Italian version here.

Maybe four hours is too low but, at the same time, pretending to be creative more than four ours a day is not a sin of pride ?
I would be clear, I am not suggesting to my Ph.D.  students to work lazily, but to be conscious that quality counts more than quantity and quality also depends on rational management of our own mental health which is the what we need to preserve. Then it is clear that some (short) periods of life require exceptional efforts. But this works only if these are the exception. Not the rule.

Projecting Climate Change Impacts on Water Resources in Regions of Complex Topography: A Case Study of the Western United States and Southern California

This is the talk given by Jeremy Pal (GS) in Trento on July 26, 2017. He talked about the impact of climate change and  land use on California water resources. Actually the work he presented is part of the awarded Master Thesis of Brianna Pagàn (see last slides).

The talk presents in a plane way the issue related to water resources management of South California, Los Angeles area. It then uses an impressive set of modeling tools to pass from climate and land use changes to water availability. You can enjoy the video and get the slides too.  

 

Here it is the abstract of the talk:

 

The Western United States and California have a greater potential vulnerability to climate change impacts on water resources due to a heavy reliance on snowmelt driven streamflow. California, the most agriculturally productive and populous region in the United States, depends on a complex and extensive water storage and conveyance system to supply water primarily for irrigation, municipal and industrial use and hydropower generation. This study provides an integrated approach to assess the impacts of climate change on the hydrologic cycle and extremes for all Southern Californian water supply basins:  Owens Valley, Mono Lake, Colorado River, Sacramento River, San-Joaquin River, and Tulare Lake basins. An 11-member ensemble of coupled atmosphere-ocean global climate models is first dynamically downscaled using a regional climate model and then statistically downscaled to force a hydrological model resulting in 4-km high-resolution output for the Contiguous United States. Greenhouse gas concentrations are prescribed according to historical values for the period 1976-2005 and to the IPCC Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 for the near term future period 2021-2050. Precipitation is projected to remain the same or slightly increase by mid-century; however, rising temperatures result in a repartitioning of precipitation type towards more rainfall and therefore a reduced snowpack and earlier snowmelt. In addition to these hydrological changes, daily annual maximum runoff and precipitation events are projected to significantly increase in intensity and frequency such that future return periods change to become substantially more common. More specifically, the current daily annual maximum runoff 10-, 25-, and 50-, and 100-year events are projected to become approximately two to ten times more likely in the future. Furthermore, annual cumulative runoff volumes are projected to increase for high flow years and in contrast decrease for low flow years reducing the reliability of the system. While the escalating likelihood of drought reduces water supply availability, earlier snowmelt and significantly more intense winter precipitation events increases flood risk requiring winter releases from reservoirs for flood control purposes. All of these factors, coupled with projected increases in population, are likely to decrease supply during the higher demand drier months necessitating multiyear storage solutions for urban and agricultural regions as well as improved infrastructure and measures for flood control.
 

The post-contemporary flood forecasting systems

This is the presentation that has been held at University of Calabria in Cosenza, July 27, 2017. The presentation builds upon several other presentation present in this blog, and discusses the issue of designing a modern flood forecasting system. Actually I distinguish post-modern, contemporary and post-contemporary systems. Of the latter a short manifesto is given.

Clicking on the figure above the reader can access the first (Italian) version of the presentation. The English version can be seen and downloaded at this link. Once downloaded, the pdf contains links to publication and other relevant presentations. With respect to the Italian version, the English version contains a few small variations. One, in particular, was suggested by Daniela Biondi. She suggested that in my Manifesto for the post-contemporary flood forecasting systems, I should add the estimation of errors in forecasting. Suggestion that I fully endorse.

Jackknife

I found this nice paper on Jackknife, worth to read. Easy also to understand the differences between the jackknife technique and the leave-one-out one.

You can click on the knife to download it.