The publication of geoscientific model developments v1.0

Geoscientific Model Development (a.k.a. GMD) has become for many, including us, a Journal of reference. Its open access policy with the fact that it covers a gap in scientific literature, has made of it a journal that quickly gained an impact factor of 5 (which is the higher among the journals in which I publish). Its success made to increase  the papers submitted exponentially, and, at this point, the Editors decided to restrict the policy for publication of the papers. The new editorial for publication is here (or clicking under the image).

I suggest that any modeller reads it. 

The Snow Water Equivalent (NewAGE-SWE) model component in JGrass-NewAGE

This is, at the moment, a stub prepared to contain the material related to the paper provisionally entitled: The Cache La Poudre snow water equivalent modelling with JGrass-NewAGE.

The paper has been finally submitted to GMD, and the Discussion Manuscript is therefore visible to everybody on GMDD. The revised version of the paper can be seen instead here.

Here the abstract of the revised paper: "The paper presents a package of a modified temperature index based snow water equivalent model as part of the hydrological modeling system NewAge-JGrass. 35 Three temperature-based snow models are integrated in the
NewAge-JGrass modeling system and use many of its com- ponents such as those for radiation balance (SWRB), kriging (KRIGING), automatic calibration algorithms (particle swarm optimization), and tests of goodness of fit (NewAge-V), to build suitable modelling solutions (MS). Similarly to all the NewAge-JGrass components, the models can be exe- cuted both in raster and in vector mode. The simulation time step can be daily, hourly or sub-hourly, depending on user needs and availability of input data. The MS are applied on the Cache la Poudre river basin (CO, USA) using three test applications. First, daily snow water equivalent is simulated for three different measurement stations for two snow model formulations. Second, hourly snow water equivalent is sim- ulated using all the three different snow model formulations. Finally a raster mode application is performed to compute snow water equivalent maps for the whole Cache la Poudre basin. In all the applications the model performance is satis- factory in terms of goodness of fit relative to measured snow water equivalent time series and the results, and the differences in performances of the different modelling solutions are discussed."

The model, the data, and the simulations' scripts used in the paper will be made available through the appropriate links from this page in order to let people reproduce our results. In fact, we call it Reproducible Research. It is certainly a challenging strategy for any researcher, and sometimes data cannot be disclosed. However, I said what I said, and this is a couple of old posts which fully explain my position (About Scientific Software, No code - No paper).

Direct Solar Radiation Models by Formetta et al. 2012-2013

This paper presents two new modelling components based on the Object Modelling System v3 for the calculation of the shortwave incident radiation on complex topography settings, and the implementation of several ancillary tools. To understand it, it can be useful to give a look to the previous post on radiation of few weeks ago. The first component, NewAGE-SwRB, accounts for slope, aspect, shadow and the topographical information of the sites, and use suitable parametrisation for obtaining the cloudless irradiance. A second component, NewAGE-DEC-MOD's is implemented to estimate the irradiance reduction due to the presence of clouds, according to three parameterisations. To obtain a working modelling composition, suitable to be compared with ground data at measurement stations, the two components are connected to a Kriging component, and, with the use of a further component NewAGE-V (verification package), the performance of modeled is quantitatively evaluated. The two components (and the various parametrisations they contain) are tested using the data from three basins catchments, and some simple verification test is made to assess the goodness of the methods used. The components are part of a larger system, JGrass-NewAGE, their input and outputs are given as geometrical objects immediately visualisable in a GIS (for instance the companion uDig), and can be used seamlessly with the various modelling solutions available in JGrass-NewAGE for the estimation of long wave radiation, evapotranspiration, and snow melting, as well as stand-alone components to just estimate shortwave radiation for various uses. The modularity of the approach is shown to be extensible to more accurate physical-statistical studies aimed to assess in deep the components performances and to extend spatially their results, without the necessity of recoding any part of the component but just making use of connective scripts.

This is, obviously not the first effort in such direction, and some other good softwares were produced as 
SolarFlux (in ArcInfo GIS) (Dubayah and Paul, 1995; Hetrick et al., 1993), Solar Analyst (Fu and Rich, 2000), SRAD (by Moore, 1992, and documented in Wilson and Gallant, 2000- but you can see this), Solei (Miklanek, 1993 - see this) or r.sun (Hofierka and Suri, 2002), and often integrate the models in GIS. 
Our modelling, making treasure of these previous efforts, is also in line with those tools that try to respond to the increase demand of modularity and interchangeability in hydrological and biophysical models and have been developed in the last decades.

Executable, Data, and Documentation of the system can be found following this link (not yet operational - give me a little time for preparing it, with the objective that everyone can reproduce the results of the paper). Source code is partially available through the jgrasstool page. 

JGrass-NewAge system first publication

JGrass-NewAGE started as a project for Adige River Basin Authority. The goal was to study, besides the peak flows, droughts, and integrating it with a database, a GIS system, still maintaining the possibility to change parts of the whole system at the necessity. Indeed all the ideas expressed in the  GEOFRAME talk
at 2008 CUAHSI meeting.  The pillar on which we wanted to base that effort was also to have open source, multiplatform, software, possibly developed with open source resources.

We chose to use up-to-date software engineering solutions and therefore we looked for developing software by components.  As explained in another posts we first chose OpenMI and eventually OMS v3 as components framework. We are currently happy with this choice and finally the whole system seems to work incrementally.

The publication on GMD hopefully speaks by itself about what the system does (but many aspects of this enterprise will be explained in other papers). What we hope that this effort can attract the work of other producers of components to enrich the choices that users can do.