Thursday, August 4, 2022

Nobody applied to this call ! Hydrology needs people willing to work on digital hydrology either computer scientists, physicists, mathematicians and, yes, hydrologists

The call is the one below and nobody applied to the call. I am willing to try to get a new call for it but this time I hope that someone show up with the appropriate background and, above all, the appropriate will.  


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Ph.D. position on building a Digital eArth Twin of Hydrology  (DARTHs)


Reference persons: Riccardo Rigon (abouthydrology@gmail.com)
Website of the call: https://www.unitn.it/en/phd-nrrp-calls (further information coming soon on the site)

We are seeking for a pro-active individual either with a degree in environmental engineering, physics, mathematics with the will to work on the informatics infrastructure of the GEOframe/OMS3 system or someone with a degree in Informatics or Computer Science willing to mix their knowledge with the needs of Hydrology and Earth System Sciences in order to provide services to computer modelling and forecasting of hydrological quantities. The system being developed is being applied to the Po river catchments for the forecasting of droughts and the assessment of water availability and will be subsequently extended to the whole Italy.
The starting point is the project currently being developed at the basin Authority of river Po and will be based on the informatics of the GEOframe/OMS3/CSIP (Object Modelling System/Cloud Service integration platform).
The duties and the scope of the PhD work could vary according to the candidate background and attitude and can include: improvements of the workflows of the platform towards the direction to obtain a DARTH, improving the parallelism of computation in the cloud (by modifying OMS3/CSIP or using other tools like Airflow and Kubernetes), providing visual AR/VR interfaces to the workflow, cleaning the entire platform and evolve it.

In this project imagination and willing to challenge theirselves comes before than any already acquired knowledge.

The Ph.D. will be in an international context which include the participation of Colorado State University (dr. Olaf David) for OMS3/CSIP, Pisa University (dr. Marco Danelutto) for parallel computing, University of Saskatchewan (dr. Martyn Clark and dr. Wouter Knoben) for shared workflow and ourselves in Trento (dr. Riccardo Rigon, dr. Giuseppe Formetta, dr. Niccolò Tubini). We do not exclude the possibility to open further collaboration with colleagues of the University of Trento or the Trentino Research System. Besides the work will be in strict contact with the Po river basin authority for which the infrastructure will be deployed. The candidate is assumed to spend at least 6 months in Colorado State University and 6 months at the Po river basin Authority.
The interested candidate are invited to contact dr. Riccardo Rigon at abouthydrology@gmail.com. The official call is at https://www.unitn.it/en/phd-nrrp-calls
For who interested in deepening the knowledge about the Digital eArth Twins of Hydrology (DARTH) a concept paper was written for Hydrology and Earth System Science and can be found here.
The infrastructure built will be open source, built with open-source tools, openly documented by using literate programming and literate computing workflows. It will also makes it easier to share public open data, and, at the same time, getting their elaboration back. FAIR principles are already at the core of the existing infrastructure, as it can be deduced from http://abouthydrology.blogspot.com/2022/03/geoframe-essentials.html and http://abouthydrology.blogspot.com/search/label/DARTH
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I understand that the topic is challenging and needs an environmental engineer (she, he, they) who like informatics or a computer scientist who likes to work outside traditional computer science topics. Or a physicist or a mathematician (originally I graduated in Physics, for instance).  But I think the work is very exciting, unique but, at the same time, opening job perspective everywhere in the environmental field. So please who is interested write to me. This call was not  considered a good one but hydrological science cannot move on without this kind of persons. 


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