I've shared various posts about the STRADIVARI project over recent months. Now that both versions, submitted to the ERC Advanced Grant and FIS3 programs, were not selected for funding, I feel free to upload them to my collection of unsuccessful proposals. The panel evaluations, when they arrive, will provide valuable learning opportunities.
I'm fully aware these projects were ambitious, perhaps overly so. I sinned of pride. Yet I would be far more troubled if the panels judged them as "incremental" science, which would reveal a superficial analysis. While science advances steadily, hydrological science in particular suffers from persistent methodological weaknesses in model construction that prevent us from addressing fundamental questions properly. Too many simulation-based papers rely on flawed algorithms, imprecise conceptualizations, vague process descriptions, equations applied beyond their validity ranges, missing feedbacks between coupled processes, imprecise and not well controlled data inputs (especially when going global).
The root cause lies in how models are conceptualized and built. Until our community recognizes this fundamental issue, we cannot progress toward answering the discipline's core questions. The current modeling paradigm perpetuates a cycle where narrative sophistication masks conceptual and physical/mathematical inadequacy.
When one attempts serious methodological critique, it's too easily dismissed as contrarianism, nastiness, or the rant of an angry dog rather than engaged with substantively. Flawed or myopic established approaches routinely appear in top journals without appropriate analysis, often relying on cherry-picked validation through calibration exercises. Let's be clear: many models do not work properly, and their results lack accountability. They are built on fragile foundations and superficial verification, yet their publication convinces project reviewers that fundamental problems have been solved when they haven't. This reaches its apex in global models where hyperresolution is married with hyperignorance (Beven et al., 2015), and in ancillary sciences studying the "Total Environment," where results on water quantities, fluxes and quality are presented as established fact when they remain deeply uncertain.
To Cosma Shalizi's sharp observation (adapted to our context): the public discussion of hydrological models and processes often becomes "polluted by maniacal cultists with obscure ties to decadent plutocrats." I am obviously kidding. However, today there are many people ".. who think they can go from the definition of conditional probability, via Harry Potter fanfic, to prophesying that an AI god will judge the quick and the dead, and condemn those who hindered the coming of the Last Day to the everlasting simulated-but-still-painful fire." I fight against this but I am, maybe, obsolete.
This resistance and blindness to foundational critique, choosing institutional legacy over rational evaluation, ultimately impedes scientific progress. The STRADIVARI projects represented an attempt to break this cycle through component-based, rigorously coupled Earth system modeling, allowing hypothesis testing and cooperative work. Whether deemed too ambitious or not, the underlying questions it raised remain urgent and unresolved (and I am not the only one to write it. Voices are many).
Here the projects, useful to learn how to write a project differently:
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