Workshop on coupled hydrological modeling in Padua, 23-24 September 2015

At the beginning there were the CATHY DAYS among friends working around the CATHY model. With time the crew has grown to include close friends of CATHY's authors, like me, Alberto Bellin, Aldo Fiori (GS). Then the group even become larger including a lot of people working with PARFLOW or Thetis-Chloris or various aspects of hydrological modelling with process based models or, like me this year, with travel times approaches. Many thanks to the organizers, Matteo Camporese (RG,GS), Mario Putti (GS) and Stefano Orlandini (RG,GS).

The two days experience was pretty good, an here you can find the contributions of those who gave the permission to publish their slides. Slides include interesting references. Clicking on the slides images brings you to the slideshare site of the workshop. I subdivided the talks in; CATHY related, PARFLOW related, GEOtop related, On Travel time approaches, and on General/Various topics.

On CATHY

Marcello Fiorentini (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy)
Control of coupling mass balance error in the CATHY model

Laura Gatel (INRS-ETE, Canada, and IRSTEA, France)
Reactive solute transfers in Cathy: first work on adsorption

Damiano Pasetto (EPFL, Switzerland)
Data assimilation for distributed models: an overview of applications with CATHY

Carlotta Scudeler (INRS-ETE, Canada, and University of Padova, Italy)
Hydrological modeling of coupled surface-subsurface flow and transport phenomena: the CAtchment-HYdrology Flow-Transport (CATHY_FT) model

On PARFLOW

Gabriele Baroni (UFZ, Germany)
On the role of subsurface heterogeneity at hillslope scale with Parflow

Reed Maxwell (Colorado School of Mines, USA)
Integrating models and observations to understand the hydrology and water quality impacts from beetle-impacted watersheds

Mauro Sulis (Bonn University, Germany)
Assessment of the catchment-scale energy and water balance using fully coupled simulations and observations

On GEOtop

Giacomo Bertoldi (EURAC, Italy)
Eco-hydrological modeling in a mountain laboratory: the LTSER Matsch/Mazia

On travel time theories

Gianluca Botter (University of Padova, Italy)
StorAge Selection Functions: a tool for characterizing dispersion processes and catchment-scale solute transport

Paolo Benettin (EPFL, Switzerland)
On the integrated solute response of catchments: benchmark applications using chloride and isotopic tracers

Riccardo Rigon (University of Trento, Italy)
Implementing a travel time model for the entire river Adige: the case of JGrass-NewAGE

On General topics

Alberto Bellin (University of Trento, Italy)
The value of aggregated measurements of state variables in hydrological modeling

Giorgio Cassiani (University of Padova, Italy)
Minimally invasive monitoring of soil-plant interactions: new perspectives

Simone Fatichi (ETH Zurich, Switzerland)
Soil moisture spatio-temporal variability: insights from mechanistic ecohydrological modeling

Aldo Fiori (University of Roma Tre, Italy)
Lessons learned from integrated, physically-based hydrological models

Claude Mugler (LSCE/IPSL, France)
Darcy multi-domain approach for coupling surface-subsurface flows: Application to benchmark problems

Sylvain Weill (University of Strasbourg, France)
A dimensionally-reduced approach for coupled river-subsurface flow modeling

Alfonso Senatore (University of Calabria, Italy)
OpenCAll: A New Library for ciomputational science on parallel computers based on cellular automata paradigm

Channel Initiation

The contribution of few days ago Where do channels begin ? looks to channels' forming processes. The scientific debate has another side which regards channels network extraction.

A recent paper by Orlandini et al. (2011), whose results where also presented at CATHY meeting last January, presents a concise but nice introduction to the topic, and a few results based on works made in the Dolomites. A parallel introduction can be found in my slides.

Certainly Orlandini and Moretti have the merit to have produced the most cleaned methods to produce channels delineation (all papers cited below), and in parallel, proper methods for estimating the upslope contributing areas of any point in a catchment. This is an essential ingredient of the whole story of proper watershed (and drainage directions) delineation and we implemented most of their work (not all of it unfortunately) in JGrass. The rest is kind of an epiphenomenon.

Reference

Orlandini, S., and G. Moretti (2009a), Determination of surface flow paths from gridded elevation data, Water Resour. Res., 45, W03417, doi:10.1029/2008WR007099.

Orlandini, S., and G. Moretti (2009b), Comment on ‘‘Global search algo- rithm for nondispersive flow path extraction’’ by Kyungrock Paik, J. Geophys. Res., 114, F04004, doi:10.1029/2008JF001193.

Orlandini, S., Tarolli, P., Moretti, G., Dalla Fontana, G. (2011). On the prediction of channel heads in a complex alpine terrain using gridded elevation data, Water Resources Research, 47, W02538, doi:10.1029/2010WR009648

Where do channels begin ?

It is the title of a famous paper by David Montgomery and Bill Dietrich about channel initiation which appeared in Nature, in 1988, and was followed by a subsequent paper (in 1994 on Water Resources Research): and BTW by many others in the following years to confirm, and using their findings.

So we know much more than then about. However, those pioneering contribution, did refer to what happens in sloped but hilly environments, of Oregon and California. What about the Alps ?

Recent work by Paolo Tarolli brought some quantitative light on the issue. He presented his work at last January Cathy meeting that can be summarized as follows:

-the availability of very detailed laser scanner of topography allows a great opportunity to use objective methods to single out channels' head.
- in a region of the Italian Alps (Dolomites) were surveyed at least two main processes that drive channel initiation: i) channel heads formed essentially by surface runoff (mass wasting, in form of debris flows or "more traditional" erosion), ii) and areas where geology and groundwater seeping upward exercise important controls on channel initiation.
- Wavelet analysis allows to smooth the topography the right way to use in sequence "curvatures" for channels head initiation.

I hope it will not pass to much time before we can bring these tools inside our jgrasstools.

For who is interested, relevant papers are listed below:

References

David R. Montgomery & William E. Dietrich,Where do channels begin? , Nature 336, 232 - 234 (17 November 1988); doi:10.1038/336232a0

MONTGOMERY and DIETRICH. Source Areas, Drainage Density, and Channel Initiation . Water Resour. Res. (1989) vol. 25 (8) pp. 1907-1918

Orlandini, S., Tarolli, P., Moretti, G., Dalla Fontana, G. (2011). On the prediction of channel heads in a complex alpine terrain using gridded elevation data, Water Resources Research, 47, W02538, doi:10.1029/2010WR009648

Passalacqua, P., Tarolli, P., Foufoula-Georgiou, E. (2010). Testing space-scale methodologies for automatic geomorphic feature extraction from LiDAR in a complex mountainous landscape, Water Resources Research, 46, W11535, ISSN: 0043-1397, doi:10.1029/2009WR008812.

Pirotti and Tarolli. Suitability of LiDAR point density and derived landform curvature maps for channel network extraction. Hydrol. Process. (2010) vol. 24 (9) pp. 1187-1197

Sofia, G., Tarolli, P., Cazorzi, F., Dalla Fontana, G. (under review). Channel heads and channel network identification from high-Resolution DTM: a statistical approach, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., ISSN: 1027-5606.

Tarolli, P., Dalla Fontana, G. (2009). Hillslope-to-valley transition morphology: new opportunities from high resolution DTMs, Geomorphology, 113, 47-56, doi:10.1016/j.geomorph.2009.02.006

Presentation at CATHY's meeting

Here there is the presentation I gave yeaterday at the Cathy's meeeting:

Presentation at Padua Cathy meeting

Actually this is a synthesis of two previous presentations given at Wien EGU meeting last year

Wien's reflections on Hydrological modelling

and at Boulder in 2008.

How to do, and why to do, modern modelling

They cover the topic of modelling, and particularly, the modelling of the hydrological cycle. With respect to Boulder's presentation, currently we switched from OpenMi to OMS3. Please find the reasons in the presentations.