Working with us

After the scaring version, the practical version.  To incoming Ph.D. students

Dear *,

working with us means using our models

•   GEOtop 
•  JGrass-NewAGE

Both of them have a consistent history that involves also quite a group of publications. Their main information can be found following the links.

• GEOtop essentials 
• NewAGE essentials 

GEOtop,  to say the complete thruth, has a group of video tutorial (in Italian) that you can find here. University of Calabria paid Mountain-eering for doing them, so please use them with confidentiality.

Looking in perspective, I am working to a new incarnation of GEOtop in components. As I already explained here.  There will be then, a convegence of tools towards OMS3 and its evolutions.

So what I suggest ? First start to study the models at the links above. Willing to learn a computer language, start with Java. To start, read here.  To continue, go here.

In this language I invested quite a lot during the years. Why I choose Java can be found here.
I wrote it four years ago, but the concepts are still valid.  Recently I become more moderate, and opened to other languages. Here my opinion.

Water for life: the study of the network of interactions in the hydrological cycle and their effects

I wrote several time what I do. The following is the translation is the synthesis I prepared recently for high school students, hoping to fascinate them and drive them to the study of hydrology.  

My research consists in determining hydrological fluxes, from the sky to the earth, and again to the sky. In its flow, water sculpts earth surface, feeds life, sustains the ecosystems complexity, and is at the core of many economic activities.  The quantification of  water fluxes  is not trivial at all. It requires the use of sophisticated mathematics and implies a great variety of measures. By myself I make computer models. 

It would be a mistake to believe that the physical/mathematica details  of the hydrological cycle are known. All the hydrological cycle is ignited by sun’s radiation  which provides  the energy transformed in the hydrosphere in other forms and never trivially, by very complex dissipative structures.

Among  these: river networks, “lines” which cover (drain)  entire surfaces; vegetation, and plants which eat photons to fix carbon in their structures (from atmospheric C02) and produce oxygen  (from H20) using photosynthesis. My research focus in following water interactions through models.

With my collaborators, I developed two models: GEOtop and Jgrass-NewAGE.  
The first is a hyper-resolution model: it partitions a catchment with a grid cells of a few meters side and on this grid mathematically treats radiation, infiltration, evaporation, transpiration, rain and snow fall, snow metamorphism, soil freezing, and runoff production. All this complexity is not an end in itself, but is deemed necessary to understand local hydrological phenomena as soil moisture distribution, or shallow landslides triggering.
The second model instead tries to give answers at catchment scale, averaging out hydrological quantities, but without loosing the necessary and relevant information.  JGrass-NewAGE is used to understand what happens in medium rivers, as Adige, to large river basins, as Blue Nile: it also helps in understanding how hydrology affects and is affected by the climate crisis. 

Informatics has an important role in my research. JGrass-NewAGE,  more than a model is a modelling system, based on sophisticated informatics suitably developed to build environmental models and to make easier the interactions among researchers. 

Other two ERC Grants in Water related topics

They escape to my attention so far, but other two ERC grants were given to water scientists. First grant was given to Dani Or (GS, Blog)

“The Hidden Frontier: Quantitative Exploration of Physical and Ecological Origins of Microbial Diversity in Soil”

and, as the name let's to understand is related to the soil ecology of and microbiology.

The other ERC grant was given to Marco Dentz (GS) on Transport and mixing:

"Mixing in Heterogeneous Media Across Spatial and Temporal Scales: From Local Non-Equilibrium to Anomalous Chemical Transport and Dynamic Uncertainty"

A new topic for a Ph.D. in Hydrology

GEOtop 2.0 (http://abouthydrology.blogspot.it/search/label/GEOtop%202.0) is a successful process-based model of the hydrological cycle. It integrates both the water and energy budget and it is supplied by the MeteoIO library for meteo data interpolations. GEOtop has a development history of more than fifteen years (http://abouthydrology.blogspot.it/2015/02/geotop-essentials.html). It can be used, and has been used, for soil moisture forecasting, eco-hydrology simulations, snow pack evolution forecasting, permafrost modelling, landslide triggering assessment. Its code is a mature C++ implementation of solid algorithms and physics. However it is conceived as a monolithic structure, in which improvements can be made with difficulty and after overcoming a huge learning curve.  At the same time, the user experience is far by being optimal, and must be structurally improved.

Therefore, during the same evolution of the model, it was envisioned to migrate it towards a more flexible informatics where improvements, maintenance and documentation could be pursued more easily. This refactoring of the code, is not a trivial operation, and would require to understand the present structure of GEOtop, and advanced concepts of software engineering. The first step would be obtaining a temporary implementation according to the guideline sketched in: http://abouthydrology.blogspot.it/2014/09/improve-geotop-informatics.html.

Subsequently a tied integration of the main modules/classes should be pursued inside the Object Modeling System Infrastructure (http://abouthydrology.blogspot.it/2013/10/the-summer-school-on-object-modelling.html), as suggested in http://abouthydrology.blogspot.it/2011/03/going-beyond-present-stato-of-art-in.html.  This would immediately open the road to use the intrinsic parallelism of OMS components, with a better treatment of river basins genmetry and topology, and  the integration of the various tools developed within the JGrass-NewAGE system with GEOtop own capabilities: but it will be a byproduct of the work, not the main objective of this Ph.D.

The main work in fact will be in implementing classes for the use of unstructured meshes, for the implementation of algorithms for solving partial differential equations in a matrix free formalism, and for a parallelisation of internal algorithms of GEOtop, by using standard matrix packages or enhancing them, either in Java or C++. The focus will be in the efficiency of the implementations inside standard-main stream techniques,  in supporting literate programming, and discovering appropriate design patterns in programming this science, more than on hydrology itself. 

Integration of some of the OpenDA (http://www.openda.org/joomla/index.php) classes in OMS and their prototypical use could also part of the Ph.D. work. 

Obviously, the candidate must have programming skills in Java and C++, or the willing to pursue them having outstanding knowledge of hydrological physical processes. All the code developed is intended to be free software, and must be produced with appropriate documentation, being the reflection about research reproducibility and replicability and the productions of tools for it being effective, part itself of the main work.

Who is interested can write to me. 
The call for the doctoral positions can be found here: http://www.unitn.it/ateneo/663/concorso-di-ammissione (in Italian) e  http://www.unitn.it/en/ateneo/1954/announcement-of-selection

(in English).

Who would like to finance such a research or know programs that can support it are also welcomed. 

Good old guys and gals

These are research topic in which I gave some contribution but they went out from my immediate foreseen research pattern. Not because I do not like them but working on a particular topic is often matter of opportunities, of having the right project(s), the right student(s), and the right collaboration(s). Or sometimes is more likely matter of timing in which all the three ingredients combines. However, never say never: putting them here is not to forget them until the combination that works will reappear.

Development of tools for the analysis of geomorphic and hydrological characteristics

The availability of LIDAR topographic  and high resolution satellite data increased the available information on terrain beyond the actual capabilities to interpret it.  During the years many tools were developed, and included, in the software suite Horton Machine, at its fourth implementation in the Jgrasstools. Much more can be done, however to single out terrain characteristics that reflect hydrological and geomorphological processes, either in terms of  new mathematical techniques or fusion (or assimilation) of multiple data sets. However, the first approach will be to decompose the terrain surface with proper mathematical tools (for instance wavelets) and finding association between the components of signal with geomorphic and hydrologic forms.

The candidates are required to have good programming skills (or the will to pursue them) to improve the the JGrasstools. It is intended that all the tangible work in programming tools is produced as free software, and using free software.

My previous work in this direction is documented and referred here.

Numerical Modelling of the groundwater and surface water interaction

Recent work was made to produce new numerical schemes that integrate unsaturated and groundwater flow with sound surface water schemes (shallow water equations). This research with pursue the implementation of these schemes (and the missing theory) in a sound integrated model, which will eventually substitute the schemes present at the moment in GEOtop. At present a core of this research modeling has been implemented with an integrator of the Boussinesq groundwater equation. The candidates are required to have good programming skills or, even more important, the will to pursue them. It is intended that all the tangible work in programming  tools is produced as free software, and using free software.Eventually the modeling could also include the temperature of either in the subsurface than in surface waters and streams.

Recent work in this direction was made in implementing the integrator of the Boussines equation, either here and here.

Hydrology by residence, travel and exit times: disentangling notation and concepts

I was always convinced that looking at water budgets by residence times gives an interesting a different perspective. But my approach, so far, was mainly connected to the GIUH approach, and, in particular, to the GIUH determined from the width functions. Whilst this was fruitful with some interesting results and insights, I am kind of naive with respect to the recent work promoted by Gianluca Botter, Andrea Rinaldo, Enrico Bertuzzo and coworkers.
So together with Marialaura Bancheri, I dove in some of the papers of my friends, trying  to select, at the moment, those features related to the water budget. The result, so far, is the presentation you see below, by clicking on the image.

It does not escape to my attention that this is just a little part of the story. But, for the moment, it is enough, and this will bring certainly to new components for the JGrass-NewAGE system. Please, for some bibliography, see this previous post.

Critical Zone

I came to know about the Critical Zone through the Critical Zone Observatories. Poor me ! So I was looking for its definition. And here it is

The Earth’s Critical Zone (CZ) is defined as "the heterogeneous, near surface environment in which complex interactions involving rock, soil, water, air, and living organisms regulate the natural habitat and determine the availability of life-sustaining resources [1]".

It is not difficult to understand that studying it will be one of the most intriguing topics of the next years. Well beyond the actual way ecohydrology has arrived.

From Quijano and Ling, I simply copy:

"The CZ is the result of complex interactions of physical, chemical, and biological processes that have taken place over an evolutionary time scale [2]. These interactions have been driven by energy, mass, entropy, and information fluxes, and the result is heterogeneous but organized structures that regulate the flow of energy down the gradients of various kinds [2,3]. "

Do not have very much to add right know (but studying it is one of the original motivation of GEOtop, at larger scales of JGrass-NewAGE). Thermodynamics plays a fundamental role in it - see also here, which makes it even more interesting to me).

References

Lin, H. Earth’s Critical Zone and hydropedology: Concepts, characteristics, and advances. Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci. 2010, 14, 25–45.

Quijano, J., & Lin, H,. Entropy in the Critical Zone: A Comprehensive Review. Entropy, 16(6),  2014 , 3482–3536. doi:10.3390/e16063482

Rasmussen, C.; Troch, P.A.; Chorover, J.; Brooks, P.; Pelletier, J.; Huxman, T.E. An open system framework for integrating critical zone structure and function. Biogeochemistry 2011, 102, 15–29.

Breaktroughts lectures at university of Saskatchewan

A remarkable initiative at University of Saskatchewan, has been initiated, under the impulse of Jeff McDonnell. He invited many top hydrological scientists to express their opinion and ideas about various topics in modern hydrologic research. Fortunately, the lectures are subsequently posted on a proper channel in Youtube.
I have to say that I do not share all the ideas presented. However, they constitute a corpus that is useful to know.

The video lectures, can be found here.

What is life ? (by Erwin Schroedinger) and Hydrology

The excuse for this blog post was the reading of an old (1944) little book entitled “What is life ?” by Erwin Schroedinger. It presents the point of view of a physicist on life, before the discover of DNA, and actually influenced the subsequent research by Watson and Crick. 

My reading, besides being influenced by a general curiosity, had a scope. Hydrology, especially in its very modern declination called ecohydrology (see also here) has a lot to do with the complexity of physical, chemical and biological interactions.  However even the more physical aspects of hydrology deployed in space, present patterns, heterogeneities, feedbacks that are by themselves of an overwhelming degree of complexity. Therefore getting the method there, for life understanding,  could help for a method here, in hydrology.  The whole book is all enjoyable, however, my commentary here covers mostly three chapters, the first and the sixth, and very little the seventh.  Excerpts from the book are in italics, my own notes in normal characters. 

CHAPTER 1 - The Classical Physicist’s Approach to the Subject

INTRODUCTION

“.. though warned at the outset that the subject-matter was a difficult one a …, even though the physicist’s most dreaded weapon, mathematical deduction, would hardly be utilized. The reason for this was not that the subject was simple enough to be explained without mathematics, but rather that it was much too involved to be fully accessible to mathematics.”

Here  I see a parallel with many hydrological processes, say for instance, the hillslope processes. Many outstanding colleagues support the idea that the physics of the argument is too much complex to be treated mathematically. 

“The large and important and very much discussed question is: How can the

events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism

be accounted for by physics and chemistry? The preliminary answer which this little book will

endeavor to expound and establish can be summarized as follows: The obvious inability of present-day physics and chemistry to account for such events is no reason at all for doubting that

they can be accounted for by those sciences. “

Now, just substitute to “living organism”  “river basin” and you have an answer to the first question for hydydrology. It is indubitably that actually, in these seventy years, passed by the publication of the book, also biology itself, and molecular biology in particular did a lot of steps in the direction traced by E.S., as is, at the same level, clear that hydrology processes knowledge, and the establishment of Hydrology as a physical Science, since the work by P. Eagleson, made extraordinary jumps forward.

STATISTICAL PHYSICS. THE FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCE IS  STRUCTURE

“Yet the difference which I have just termed fundamental is of such a kind that it might easily appear slight to anyone except a physicist who is thoroughly imbued with the knowledge that the laws of

physics and chemistry are statistical throughout.”

This statement applies verbatim to Hydrology.

THE NAIVE PHYSICIST APPROACH TO THE SUBJECT

“I propose to develop first what you might call 'a naive physicist's ideas about organisms', that is,

the ideas which might arise in the mind of a physicist who, after having learnt his physics and, more especially, the statistical foundation of his science, begins to think about organisms and

about the way they behave and function and who comes to ask himself conscientiously whether

he, from what he has learnt, from the point of view of his comparatively simple and clear and

humble science, can make any relevant”

Substitute “organisms” with hydrology, hydrological processes, watersheds, at your convenience.

WHY ATOMS ARE SO SMALL ?

“Why are atoms so small? … Suppose that you could mark the molecules in a

glass of water; then pour the contents of the glass into the ocean and stir the latter thoroughly so as to distribute the marked molecules uniformly throughout the seven seas; if then you took a

glass of water anywhere out of the ocean, you would find in it about a hundred of your marked

molecules. ”

Besides being a truly hydrological example, attributed to Lord Kelvin, it also envision the scales of hydrology from molecule (in the quantum domain) to oceans (the so call, global hydrology). 

CHAPTER 6 - Order, Disorder and Entropy

A REMARKABLE GENERAL CONCLUSION FROM THE MODEL

“From Delbruck's general picture of the … substance it emerges that living matter, while not eluding the 'laws of physics' as established up to date, is likely to involve 'other laws of physics' hitherto unknown, which, however, once they have been revealed, will form just as integral a part of this science as the former.”

Substitute Delbrucks’s with “modern Hydrology’; “living matter” with “hydrological processes”. Where these other laws are, is the new frontier of hydrology. A frontier, already envisioned by some time indeed, because, I cannot deny that I can see in it the “Gold medal search” of Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe own work.

….

LIVING MATTER EVADES THE DECAY TO EQUILIBRIUM 

“ When a system that is not alive is isolated or placed in a uniform environment, all motion usually comes to a standstill very soon as a result of various kinds of friction; differences of electric or

chemical potential are equalized, substances which tend to form a chemical compound do so,

temperature becomes uniform by heat conduction. After that the whole system fades

away into a dead, inert lump of matter. A permanent state is reached, in which no

observable events occur. The physicist calls this the state of thermodynamical equilibrium, or of

‘maximum entropy' “

There is poetry in this sentence: but it could be subtly imperfect: natural systems usually work under disequilibrium conditions. In fact E.S. remarks it later in the chapter. However, not only living organisms but also eco-hydro-systems work the same way, even if at a more aggregate and “higher” level of organisation. Organisation of spatial physical systems, like river networks, and hydrological interactions work the same way, and often they show the same type of complex organisation. For their organisation, obviously, we would less inclined to talk about evading equilibrium conditions, and there we would be probably correct, but at the same time a little wrong …

IT FEEDS ON ‘NEGATIVE ENTROPY’

“By eating, drinking , breathing and (in case of plants) assimilating. The technical term is metabolism. The Greek word means change or exchange. Exchange of what? Originally the underlying idea is, no doubt, exchange of material …That the exchange of material should be the essential thing is absurd …  For a while in the past our curiosity was silenced by being told that we feed upon energy …Needless to say, taken literally, this is just as absurd. … Every process, event, happening -call it what you will; in a word, everything that is going on in Nature means an increase of the entropy of the part of the world where it is going on.”

I do not completely agree with the phrases excerpts. E.S. himself, in commenting further, does move out of this strict vision. Entropy represents uncertainty of kinetic energy microscopic configurational space. However, it is driven by energy which is, as well as mass (because space-time is locally hyperbolic and we work in non relativistic conditions), conserved. Is just the feeding up with heat that move water from a less entropic state (ice) to a more entropic state (vapor). Once in an energetic state, water molecules configuration is the most probable (more or less), but as experience teaches, the way the passage between energetic states is obtained, can strongly affects the final “metastable” configuration (and, for instance, snow flakes, are an example). So for living systems, as well as for the hydrological fluxes and states, metastable, out of equilibrium states are the key. Once the systems are not anymore fed up with mass and energy, the system decay to a stable state, which is, at the same time a state of feasible minimal potential energy and  feasible maximum   entropy. Metastability is intrinsic to everything. The universe itself, as we conceive it, is a metastable state  that moves out of the Big Bang. It would be an oddity if the same would not be true for hydrological fluxes.

CHAPTER 7 - Is Life based on the Laws of Physics ?

The tile itself is compelling. E.S. certainly opens many question as: NEW LAWS HAS TO BE EXPECTED IN THE ORGANISM. He concludes that new laws are to be expected emerging (but the word meaning was not there seventy years ago) from disorder, or organising the new order appearing at macroscopic scales:

“The orderliness encountered in the unfolding of life springs from a different source. It appears

that there are two different 'mechanisms' by which orderly events can be produced: the

'statistical mechanism' which produces order from disorder and the new one, producing order from order” 

The same type of problematics can arise even in watershed hydrology (read the title: Is Hydrology based on the Laws of Physics ?). The current practice declares that the collective work of many water molecules, and their interactions can be describe under certain circumstances, by macroscopic laws, in which the collective behaviour, the spatial structure of the problem, or other situations, are more important than the simple molecular dynamics (think to the residence time interpretation of the Instantaneous Unit Hydrograph, for the Italians, here, or, remaining on the same topic, the fact that the hydrologic response is mainly determined by the geomorphic organisation, than Navier-Stokes equation)

In the “THE NEW PRINCIPLES ARE NOT ALIEN TO PHYSICS”, E.S. in fact claims that the new physics is still physics, even if, in some sense, super-physical.  He seems to me  in a search, that is not certainly concluded, of  a unifying principle for understanding the stratification of reality, even the physical one,  in layers, each one governed by its own rules. This was enunciated more recently (translation into English is mine) as follows: 

“ We cannot deny that our universe is not a chaos; we recognise being, objects thet we recall with names. These object or things are forms, structures provided of a certain   stability; fill a certain portion of space and perdure for a certain time …” 

(R. Thom, Structural stability and morphogenesys,1975)

The search for scaling, scale invariance and scale breaking in hydrology, that made history in the last two decades,  was the analogous search of understanding these higher levels of organisation of the hydrological processes that still are quite elusive indeed.

_______________________________________________________________________________

On the same topics of What is life ? I found also the Ph.D thesis by Nathaniel Virgo , entitled “Thermodynamics and the structure of living systems”. He is also author of interesting papers referred on his website.

The thesis, besides, E.S. works cites also the previous work by Morowitz and an interesting paper by Schneider

References

- N.Virgo, Thermodynamics and the structure of living systems, University of Sussex, 2011

- Morowitz, H. (1968). Energy flow in biology. New York and London: Academic Press.

- Morowitz, H. (1978). Foundations of bioenergetics. Academic Press.

- Schneider, E. D., & Kay, J. J. (1994). Life as a manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics. Mathematical and Computer Modelling, 19(6–8), 25–48.

Uncertainty and Information Theory

We all are persuaded that uncertainty is a big topic, in life but also, in hydrology. So important that many hydrologists dedicate their life to its estimation, in connection to hydrological processes. Uncertainty since it is uncertain also generate confusion, and some of tis literature is  confuse and confusing (I don't want to cite negatively anyone, but I could).
Whatever the case, one of the best talk I attended to at last Fall American Geophysical Union Meeting, was the invited lecture by Hoshin Gupta. Hoshin has an outstanding (really outstanding, I mean) carrier in finding calibration methods, indentifiability of parameters and understanding uncertainty in models. Recently (see for instance Gong et al., 2013) he started to apply concepts derived from information theory to hydrology.  BTW, you can find the pdfs of his AGU’s presentations here: on the necessity to apply information theory concept to evaluate models structural hypotheses, and another one about Information theory and Bayesian inference in hydrology (both with a lot of citations).

I never really understood why hydrologists do not use information theory  concepts. I-Theory is a well developed mathematica theory with a lot of tools, and could help to get out from the fuzziness around  the determination of uncertainty in models. Besides, using the concept of I-Theory information/uncertainty one can gain knowledge about the complexity of processes outputs and, possibly, infer something about the "complexity" of models required to mathematically account for it in a proper way (remind: "Everything should be made as simple as possible but not simpler").

Hoshin is not the only one that was attracted by information theory. In my occasional browsing of the topic, I also found some other interesting papers: the first one, by  Majda and Gershgorin, is concerned by climate models. This is encouraging, because climate models are certainly at least as involved as hydrological models are, and, if not, even more. A second is Weijs et al. (2013): this is concerned with time series: we compare time series, therefore knowing how much information is hidden in a time serie (at least with reference according to some encoding key) is certainly useful. For Wejis and van de Giesen, this paper is just a coming back to the topic (see also Weijs et al., 2010, and Weijs CV)

Another paper came from  Rudell (GS) on EOS remarkably highlighting that the I-Theory applications to hydrology attracted last year  many more people than use to be.
For making me feeling among the smarter, I  bought a book, by Mezard (see also, and GS) and Montanari (Andrea, not our colleague Alberto who also has quite a production on uncertainty: please see his website) which can be a further source of ideas and thoughts.

So far, I never actually read carefully any one of the papers (or the book), but excited at the idea to have time to do it in deep.

References

Gong, W., H. V. Gupta, D. Yang, K. Sricharan, and A. O. Hero III (2013), Estimating epistemic and aleatory uncertainties during hydrologic modeling: An information theoretic approach, Water Resour. Res., 49, 2253–2273, doi:10.1002/wrcr.20161.

Mézard, M. and Montanari, A. , Information, Physics, and Computation, Oxford University press, 2009

Majda, A. J.,  and Gershgorin, B., Quantifying uncertainty in climate change science through empirical information theory, PNAS, August 24, 2010, vol. 107,no. 34, 14958–14963

Ruddel, B.L, N. A. Brunsell and P. C. Stoy, Applying Information Theory in the Geosciences to Quantify Process Uncertainty, Feedback, Scale, Eos, Vol. 94, No. 5, 29 January 2013

 Weijs, S. V.;  Schoups, G.  and van de Giesen, N., Why hydrological predictions should be evaluated using information theory, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 14, 2545-2558, 2010, www.hydrol-earth-syst-sci.net/14/2545/2010/, doi:10.5194/hess-14-2545-2010

Weijs, S. V., van de Giesen, N. and Parlange, M. B., Data compression to define information content of hydrological time series, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 17, 3171–3187, 2013 www.hydrol-earth-syst-sci.net/17/3171/2013/ doi:10.5194/hess-17-3171-2013

Quickness and exactitude

I put here an internal review of one of our manuscript, because, I hope, it can be useful in general. The topic is evaluating the rainfall runoff of a small catchment (but I hoped it was en estimation of the global hydrological cycle, even if without evapotranspiration measurements).

"The paper is written in a good English (finally). However good English does not mean is a good paper. It lacks of focus and is not concise (lack of exactitude and quickness, see at the end of the post). Objectives are not clear, and the novelties of the paper not evident. However, I am not desperate to obtain at the end something reasonable: but this just because I know the amount of work behind it, and, in part, the row-material.

Making a rainfall-runoff model cannot be usually considered an exercise at the frontier of our science (citing conversations with Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe. However, it could be, as testified by Gunther Bloschl's ERC). It, making rainfall-runoff, I mean, certainly can bring information about a certain basin. However, in our case, the works of N* and M* already filled this space. So what it is the goal of this paper ?

The initial idea was to assess the uncertainty in prediction of discharges by using appropriate statistical techniques. In particular, the idea was to assess the uncertainty inherent to rainfall extrapolation from point measurements to spatial measurements. 

This task has been only partially fulfilled. For the following reasons: errors due to instruments precision were not included (just the hypothesis of perfect functioning measures was applied);  the way rainfall has been included in the model (is not yet clear if average rainfall, one point for each hillslope was used, average rainfall volume for any information or other approximations were utlised: and no sensitivity analysis with respect to the way distribute rainfall was squeezed into the model was performed); the interplay between rainfall and discharge forecasting is not well developed, at least as it could be, i.e. explaining how it works inside the whole procedure is not explained well.  

Therefore the overall rainfall prediction analysis is incomplete, and I expect it would be completed for the thesis. 

The technical novelty we apply in this work is that we use a calibration tool (LUCA) to assess variograms, and we do it at hourly time step, while others do usually at daily time step. A few questions here: how much this approach improves rainfall estimates ? i.e., taking uncalibrated variograms and/or constant variograms (not varying in time) how much difference do we get ? How much this affects the forecasting of the volumes of water? Which comprehensive effect has this on the forecasting of the discharges ?

It could be that all of these approximation have negligible effects on the forecasting of discharges. But this would be indeed good to know and an achievement, which was not obtained so far. 

A second topic of interest was the simulation of the whole hydrological cycle, and a tentative to close the hydrological budget with the Priestley-Taylor simulation of evapotranspiration. This simulations were done but not shown at all in the manuscript. Why not ? Do the simulated discharges and the  simulated ET sum to the total volume of rainfall ? If not, which interpretation do we have about the missing mass ?  Are we able to assess the uncertainty in predictions of each single component of the hydrological cycle obtained with this method? Are we able to observe interannual variability (both in discharges and evapotranspiration, and, if the case, in storage) ? Is this variability estimate reliable, at least as a gross budget ?

Having missed to answer to each one of the questions above the paper results a wandering around that breaks our karma (citation from Vijay K. Gupta).  Please save us with more rigor. 

Regarding quickness and exactitude, I suggest the reading of Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the next Millennium.^1^2

^1 - Here a video seminar on the Six Memos by Paolo Granata
^2 - Hainging around, in a digression maybe, and unfortunately in Italian, the Discorso sulla Matematica (Talk on Mathematics) inspired and guided by Calvino's lectures, written by Gabriele Lolli

Residence time approaches to the hydrological budgets

The natural evolution of geomorphic unit hydrograph approach to the hydrologic response is the analysis of residence time of water for any of the processes in the hydrological budget. Indeed,  there exists something already done in this direction of research, and can be found in the work of Andrea Rinaldo and collaborators. Gianluca Botter talked about the topic in his speech reported here, in a recent post. Without the claim to be very general, very deep, or very informed, I am collecting here some papers of the group on the subject.
Residence time is important under several aspects. The more direct application of theories per residence time seems to be the estimation of pollutants transport around the catchments, but the use of isotopic tracers to determine the age of water, immediately move their applications also the  understanding of the dynamics of runoff formation with mixing between various "waters". If plants are included, also evapotranspiration can become part of the game thus modifying what we expect (See also the post here with related references). Why not, then, make a step forward and use the theory also for temperature (as a passive tracer) ?
This could disclose a way to follow the entropy production and fluxes in the hydrological cycle at catchment scale: a topic in itself.

References

Benettin, P., A. Rinaldo, and G. Botter (2013), Kinematics of age mixing in advection-dispersion models, Water Resour. Res., 49, 8539–8551, doi:10.1002/2013WR014708.

E. Bertuzzo, M. Thomet, G. Botter, A. Rinaldo, Catchment-scale herbicides transport: Theory and application, Advances in Water Resources 52 (2013), p. 232–242

Botter, G., E. Bertuzzo, and A. Rinaldo (2010), Transport in the hydrologic response: Travel time distributions, soil moisture dynamics, and the old water paradox, Water Resour. Res., 46, W03514, doi:10.1029/2009WR008371.

Botter, G., E. Bertuzzo, and A. Rinaldo (2011), Catchment residence and travel time distributions:
The master equation, GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 38, L11403, doi:10.1029/2011GL047666

Botter, G., Catchment mixing processes and travel time distributions, Water Resour. Res., 48, W05545, doi:10.1029/2011WR011160.

F. Comola, B. Schaefli, A. Rinaldo and M. Lehning, Thermodynamics in the hydrologic response: Travel time formulation and application to Alpine catchments, Water resour. Res., Accepted manuscript online: 13 FEB 2015 03:59AM EST | DOI: 10.1002/2014WR016228

Cornaton, F., and P. Perrochet (2006), Groundwater age, life expectancy and tran- sit time distributions in advective-dispersive systems: 1. Generalized reservoir the- ory, Advances in Water Resources, 29(9), 1267–1291, doi:10.1016/j.advwatres.2005. 10.009. 

Cornaton, F. J. (2012), Transient water age distributions in environmental flow systems: The time-marching Laplace transform solution technique, Water Resources Research, 48(3), n/a–n/a, doi:10.1029/2011WR010606. 

Cvetkovic, V., C. Carstens, J.-O. Selroos, and G. Destouni (2012), Water and solute transport along hydrological pathways, Water Resources Research, 48(6), W06,537, doi:10.1029/2011WR011367. 

Ginn, T. R. (1999), On the distribution of multicomponent mixtures over generalized ex- posure time in subsurface flow and reactive transport: Foundations, and formulations for groundwater age, chemical heterogeneity, and biodegradation, Water Resources Research, 35(5), 1395–1407. 

Ginn, T. R., H. Haeri, A. Massoudieh, and L. Foglia (2009), Notes on Groundwater Age in Forward and Inverse Modeling, Transport in Porous Media, 79(1), 117–134, doi:10.1007/s11242-009-9406-1. 

Harman, C. J. (2014), Time-variable transit time distributions and transport: Theory and application to storage-dependent transport of chloride in a watershed, Water Resources Research, doi:10.1002/2014WR015707. 

Kirchner, J., X. Feng, and C. Neal (2001), Catchment-scale advection and dispersion as a mechanism for fractal scaling in stream tracer concentrations, Journal of Hydrology, 254(1-4), 82–101, doi:{10.1016/S0022-1694(01)00487-5}. 

McDonnell, J., et al. (2010), How old is the water ? Open questions in catchment transit time conceptualization, modelling and analysis, Hydrol. Processes, 24(12), 1745–1754.

McGuire, K. J., and J. J. McDonnell (2006), A review and evaluation of catchment transit time modelling, J. Hydrol., 330, 543–563.

Niemi, A. J. (1977), Residence time distribution of variable flow processes, Int. J. Appl. Radiat. Isot., 28, 855–860.

Rinaldo, A. and Rodriguez-Iturbe, I., Geomorphological theory of the hydrologic response, Hydrol Proc., vol 10, 803-829, 1996

Rinaldo, A., K. J. Beven, E. Bertuzzo, L. Nicotina, J. Davies, A. Fiori, D. Russo, and G. Botter (2011), Catchment travel time distributions and water flow in soils, Water Resour. Res., 47, W07537, doi:10.1029/2011WR010478. (See also the complimentary material: here)

van der Velde, Y., P. J. J. F. Torfs, S. E. A. T. M. van der Zee, and R. Uijlenhoet (2012), Quantifying catchment-scale mixing and its effect on time-varying travel time distributions, Water Resources Research, 48, doi:{10.1029/2011WR011310}. 

Weiler, M., B. L. McGlynn, K. J. McGuire, and J. J. McDonnell (2003), How does rainfall become runoff? a combined tracer and runoff transfer function approach, Water Resources Research, 39(11), n/a–n/a, doi:10.1029/2003WR002331. 

Four academic brothers (of mine)

I have many academic brother since Andrea Rinaldo is very prolific in generating first class researchers. I have even more I consider the inheritance of Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe, my postdoc advisor at (that time at) Texas A&M Unversity. Of the many three agreed to send me the presentations they gave at the Honour doctorate of Andrea Rinaldo, and you can find them with a little comment here below. 

The older (of the three) brother, Marco Marani, from Padova University and Duke, presented a work on the soil-water-plants continuum. He emphasize the role of roots in modifying the soil water distribution, otherwise controlled by Darcy flows. However, he also studied and talked about the influence of the soil-plants-atmosphere continuum. The presentation is here. The couple of references cited are: Volpe et al., 2013 and Manoli et al., 2014. 

Gianluca Botter talked about the travel time distribution approach to catchment scale transport. A topic that intersects also the “old water paradox” querelle, but is, in general, pretty effective in getting the distribution of pollutants. This approach has a long story that put its roots, in Gedeon Dagan’s work, as well as in Rodriguez-Iturbe geomorphic unit hydrograph. Andrea own papers on Mass response function with Sandro Marani can also be considered at the foundations of this presentation. 

Among the reference, recent papers on the topic are Botter et al., 2010 and Benettin et al., 2013. The presentation is here

Enrico Bertuzzo (GS) covered instead the new topic of water borne  diseases and their spreading along rivers. The way Enrico and coworkers analysed the problem, certainly inherited many notions and ideas sprout the early studies on river networks structure by Andrea (I had a part in it), but also on recent and domain specific achievements and findings. In the presentation he cited just one paper, but the research outcomes on the topic are certainly copious and exciting. The presentation is here. 

Andrea D’Alpaos (GS)  talked about tidal networks, their formation, their shapes, their similarity or dissimilarity from river networks. All of it in a blend of equations, analysis in the field and lab experiments. Another fascinating topic that was started with Andrea.  The presentation is here.

Overall is interesting to judge the differentiation of topics and methods used by the authors, expressing that each developed his on research personality and attitude.

ERC grants in Water Related topics

To my knowledge, three were, so far the grants given in water related topics by the ERC committes.

The first was assigned to Andrea Rinaldo's in 2008 and was entitled on "Modelling waterborne epidemics. It was the first ERC grant to be assigned to a hydrologist, and the success story can be found at the link above. His research was also told at the opening of our 2014 Doctoral School.

The second one was given to Gunther Bloeschl in 2012, and is entitled: Decipher River Flood Change. Its short description is:
" Major floods around the world have raised questions about the frequency and magnitude of such phenomena. Although changes in climate and land use are known to play a critical role in river floods, how they actually translate into considerable variations in intensity remains unknown "

The third ERC was assigned in 2013 to Doerthe Tetzlaff for a project called veWA:

"VeWa: Vegetation effects on water flow in high-latitude ecosystems” project will examine the impacts of climate change on vegetation-water linkages along a northern climatic gradient, investigating four intensively studied experimental sites in the UK, Canada and Sweden ...  Such a geographically extensive comparison has never been conducted in such environments and will allow the consistency of processes, drivers and climatic impacts to be assessed across a range of spatial scales”

The Presentation at the Mountain Research Initiative Key Contact Workshop held in Berkeley Dec 8, 2013

After a few years, I am back to San Francisco AGU meeting. It is  a place where I grew up, since I participated ten times in 22 years.  For the very same reason that the fall meeting is crowded with more than twenty thousands of geophysicists coming from all around the World, many side meetings are organized. The MRI side meeting is one of these, and I participated.

The meeting involved a small group of people (around twenty) but was really interesting and productive. One can find all the contribution to discussion on the MRI website. At the moment, you can see my contribution by clicking on the image above. For knowing more about my research activities, these two posts can be useful: My past Research, Research Topics for the next 20 years.

My Past Research on Cryopheric Hydrology

In [J22] it was demonstrated that a single-layer snowpack model can be sufficiently accurate in describing the evolution of the water equivalent of the snow, as long as the incident radiation is calculated accurately taking care of shadows and the complexity of mountain topography.

Subsequently, the single-layer model was replaced with a multilayer model in order to forecast the evolution of density and of metamorphism of the snow as well as the percolation phenomena within the snowpack, during the thesis of Stefano Endrizzi. Among the various studies carried out, one validates the snow model satellite data derived from MODIS [A41].  Furthermore, the same model was used to study the hydrological evolution of glaciers in Trentino (Alpine) and South America (Equatorial) [A39, A47].  Eventually, the modeling of the cryosphere moved towards considering evolutive processes of permafrost [thesis of Matteo Dall'Amico, and J30], that is the layer of soil subject to temperatures below zero centigrades for more than two consecutive years.  All of these research projects, as well as allowing the aforementioned studies, are necessary to modeling the entire yearly hydrological cycle in mountain environments such as Trentino.

[J30], drawing from an accurate work of reanalysis of process thermodynamics, implements a robust method for the integration of the freezing-soil equation.  The numeric algorithm used is globally convergent Newtonian method that is appropriate for the equations under study.  [J36] is a geomorphological survey of rock glaciers in Trentino, to be subsequently modelled with GEOtop.

References in English


[ J22] - Zanotti, F., Endrizzi, S, Bertoldi, G. e R. Rigon, The GEOTOP snow module, Hydrol. Proc., 18, 3667-3679 (2004), DOI 10.1002/hyp.5794

[j30]- M. Dall’Amico, S. Endrizzi, S. Gruber, and R. Rigon, An energy-conserving model of freezing variably-saturated soil, The Cryosphere, 5, 469-484, 2011, doi:10.5194/tc-5-469-2011

[J36] - R. Seppi, A. Carton, M. Zumiani, M. Dall’Amico, G. Zampedri, R. Rigon, "Inventory, distribution and topographic features of rock glaciers in the southern region of the Eastern Italian Alps (Trentino)" in Geografia Fisica e Dinamica Quaternaria, v. 2012, n. 35(2) (In press)

[A41] Endrizzi S., Bertoldi G., Neteler M., and Rigon R., Snow Cover Patterns and Evolution at Basin Scale: GEOtop Model Simulations and Remote Sensing Observations, Proceedings of the 63th Eastern Snow Conference,


References in Italian

[A47] Noldin I., Endrizzi S., Rigon R., Dall’Amico M, Sistema di drenaggio di un ghiacciaio alpino, Neve e Valanghe, n. 69, 48-52, 2010

My Past Research on Physico-Statistical Modelling of the Water Cycle at Basin Scale

While GEOtop [J24, J25] is for process-based modelling of the mass and energy budgets at a small scale, in order to model larger catchments, which include abstraction works or hydraulic structures, it was decided to implement a new modelling system JGrass-NewAGE [J34].  This system sacrifices process details in favour of  efficient calculations.  It is made of components apt at returning statistical hydrological quantities, opportunely averaged in time and space.  One of the goals of this implementation effort was to create the basis for a physico-statistical hydrology in which the hydrological spatially distributed dynamics is reduced into low dimensional components, when necessary surrogating the internal heterogeneities with "suitable noise" and a probabilistic description.

Unlike other efforts of synthesis, JGrass-NewAge wants to keep the spatial description explicit, at various degrees of simplicity.  This has been made possible by opportune processing of distributed information which, in this way, has become part of the model itself.
From the point of view of the information technology used to implement the modelling  [J41, A44, A49, A50], the system is based on the OMS v 3 system, which allows the use of modern, object-oriented strategies for the structuring of the deployment of the software and, at the same time, furnishing not a model, but various, interchangeable, modeling solutions (MS) that can be adapted to the problems in hand and the practical demands of the problem being solved.
The modeling system, as well as the components to model the physical processes themselves, also includes various tools for the processing of input data (for example, Kriging tools), including all the tools of the Horton Machine [eb3] for the processing of digital terrain data, and the tools for the treatment and interpretation of the output data, for the calibration of model parameters, and (in perspective) for continuous data assimilation.
With this in mind, an effort that is currently being made is that of creating an opportune digital watershed scheme that can accommodate the needs of the various modeling conceptualizations and the identification of areas that are hydrologically "similar" that can be treated conjointly during the calculation of flows and storage. At the moment, model solutions use standard implementations.  [J34, J41, A50] contains the description of the rainfall-runoff part of the modelling system; [J43] is a verification of the radiation budgets components; [J44] is an example of simplified snow modelling.  As a standard, any components is verified by itself against the data relative to the process that it describes, using various automatic calibration procedures, and quantitative objective functions. [J34, J41] using the infrastructure show how increased geomorphological (and processes) information affects the quality of reproduction of the hydrologic response. [j44] explains the watershed partition, based on a generalisation of the Pfafstetter numbering scheme, that guide the functioning of the JGrass-NewAGE system.

References 

In English:

[J24] - Rigon R., Bertoldi G e T. M. Over, GEOtop: A distributed hydrological model with coupled water and energy budgets, Vol. 7, No. 3, pages 371-388

[J25] Bertoldi G. R. Rigon e T. M. Over, Impact of watershed geomorphic char- acteristics on the energy and water budgets, Vol. 7, No. 3, pages 389-394, 2006

[J34] - Formetta, G.; Mantilla, R.; Franceschi, S., Antonello A., Rigon R., The JGrass- NewAge system for forecasting and managing the hydrological budgets at the basin scale: models of flow generation and propagation/routing, Geoscientific Model Development Volume: 4 Issue: 4 Pages: 943-955, DOI: 10.5194/gmd-4- 943-201, 2011

[A49] Formetta G., Antonello A., Franceschi S., David O. and Rigon R., The informatics of the hydrological modelling system JGrass-NewAge, 2012 International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software Managing Resources of a Limited Planet, Sixth Biennial Meeting, Leipzig, Germany R. Seppelt, A.A. Voinov, S. Lange, D. Bankamp (Eds.) http://www.iemss.org/society/index.php/iemss- 2012-proceedings, 2012

[j36] - Formetta G., Rigon R., Chavez J.L., David O., The short wave radiation model in JGrass-NewAge System, Geosci. Model Dev., 6, 915-928, 2013, www.geosci-model-dev.net/6/915/2013/
doi:10.5194/gmd-6-915-2013

[J39] - Formetta G., Antonello A., Franceschi S., David O., and Rigon R., Hydrological modelling with components: A GIS-based open-source framework, Environmental Modelling & Software, 5 (2014), 190-200

[j42] - Formetta G., David O., Kampf S., Rigon R., The Cache la Poudre river basin snow water equivalent modeling with NewAge-JGrass, accepted GMD, 2014

[j44] Formetta G. , Antonello A. , Franceschi S. , David O., Rigon R.,  Digital watershed representation within the NewAge-JGrass system. Boletin Geologico y Minero, 125 (3): 371-381, 2014. ISSN: 0366-0176

In Italian:

[A44] Antonello A., Franceschi S., Formetta G., Rigon R., L’infrastruttura NewAGE per la previsione e la gestione dei bilanci idrici a scala di bacino: I - La struttura informatica, in Atti XXXII Convegno di Idraulica e Costruzioni Idrauliche, Palermo, 14-17 Settembre 2010

[A45] Formetta G., Franceschi S., Antonello A., Cordano E., Mantilla R., Rigon R., Il sistema NewAGE per la previsione e la gestione dei bilanci idrici a scala di bacino. II - I modelli di generazione, aggregazione e propagazione del deflusso. in Atti XXXII Convegno di Idraulica e Costruzioni Idrauliche, Palermo, 14-17 Settembre 2010

[A50] Formetta G., Rigon R, Le nuove componenti modellistiche di JGrass-NewAGE, Atti del XXXIII Convegno di Idraulica e costruzioni Idrauliche, Brescia, 10-15 settembre 2012

My Past Research on Shallow Landslide and Mass Flow Triggering

The role of hydrology in triggering mass movements was initially confronted with an implementation of the theories of Montgomery and Dietrich [1994] (MD), and the case of instability caused by surface runoff [A21, A26, A27].  The study then continued with the analysis of transient phenomena, that is the instabilities caused by the propagation of pressure waves in the unsaturated medium  [A31, A32], according to the theory by Iverson [2000] (I), and integrating  the two, MD1994 and I2000, views even in the case of rainfall of varying intensity [A21, J23].
Then, the simplified approach  (important in as so much as it highlighted some qualitative aspects of infiltration in the hillslopes) was supplanted by the use of the GEOtop model for the continual simulation of hydrological variables [A38, J26], and transient effects, within a minimal set of simplifications.  The use of GEOtop has allowed for the separation of the hydrological part, effectively modeled by GEOtop, and the geotechnical part, contained in the GEOtop-FS model [J26].  Particularly, the latter of these was the subject of a probabilistic treatment that introduced uncertainties into the main geotechnical parameters  [J26].
The paper [J26], and the thesis of Silvia Simoni introduced a systematic approach to the identification of areas of instability that made full use of the potential of on-site geophysical measurement campaigns and the a priori characterization of geotechnical properties of the soil in the laboratory, without using back analyses for the calibration of parameters as is generally done by simplified models.  The IRASMOS Reports [rep06, rep07 and rep08] represent a summary of the literature available on this subject which has been eventually refined in [rep09].

The most recent work  has been focused on trying to understand the dynamics of subsurface flow  in  by means of virtual experiments [A43] with GEOtop, and in more conceptualized terms to explicit the role of the variability of depth of soil [J33, J35, thesis of Cristiano Lanni]  with the model denominated CI-SLAM.  The result is the introduction of the concept of "hydrological connectivity" of the hillslopes, which is realized when a perched water table forms that covers the whole basin.  The connectivity concept bridged the gap between hillslope hydrology and basin hydrology, and has also consequences important for hillslopes' stability [J37]. In fact these concepts allows a better statistical identification of landslide areas, than previous similar models.  [J35] also contains a preliminary attempt to use the theories of self-organizing criticality in the context of instability propagation, which, evidently, heralds the actual landslide itself.

Paper [J46] faces the issues related to the choice of a certain parameterisation of the soil retention curves and analyses their relation to hillslope stability. It uses a new theory that uses double porosity, and estimates the stability with the use of the new theories by Lu, Likos and Godt.

References

In English:

[ J23] - D’Odorico, P., Fagherazzi G., Rigon R. Potential for landsliding: Dependenceon hyetograph characteristics J. Geophys. Res., Vol. 110, No. F1, F01007 10.1029/2004JF000127 10 February 2005

[J26] Simoni, S., F. Zanotti, G. Bertoldi and R. Rigon, Modelling the probability ofoccurrence of shallow landslides and channelized debris flows using GEOtop-FS, Hydrol. Process. 22, 532–545, 2008, DOI: 10.1002/hyp.6886

[J33] - Lanni, C.; McDonnell, J. J.; Rigon, R., On the relative role of upslope anddownslope topography for describing water flow path and storage dynamics:a theoretical analysis, Hydrological Processes Volume: 25 Issue: 25 Pages: 3909-3923, DEC 15 2011, DOI: 10.1002/hyp.8263

[J35] - Lanni C., J. McDonnell JJ, Hopp L., Rigon R., "Simulated effect of soil depthand bedrock topography on near-surface hydrologic response and slope stability" in EARTH SURFACE PROCESSES AND LANDFORMS, v. 2012, (In press). - URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/esp.3267/abstract . - DOI: 10.1002/esp.3267

[J37] Lanni C., Borga M., Rigon R., and Tarolli P., Modelling catchment-scale shallowlandslide occurrence by means of a subsurface flow path connectivity index, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci. Discuss., 9, 4101-4134, (in press at HESS)

[A31] - E. Cordano, P., Bartolini, Rigon R. A flexible numerical approach to solving a generalized Richards’ equation problem and some applications, 2004

[rep06]- Rigon R., Rickenmann D., Catalogue of causes and triggering thresholds (Ed), IRASMOS EU Project Deliverable 1.1, 2007

[rep07] - Rigon R. (Ed), State-of-the-art models: their transferability and model application, IRASMOS EU ProjectDeliverable 1.2, 2007

[rep08] - R. Rigon, State of the art of prediction techniques, IRASMOS EU Project Deliverable 1.3, 2007

[rep09] - R.Rigon, Franceschi, S., Monacelli, G., and Formetta, G., The triggering of landslides and debris flows and their mapping, Danube Flood Risk EU Project, 2012

[J46] - Ciervo F. ,  Casini F. , Papa M.N. ,  Rigon R., Some remarks on bimodality effects of the hydraulic properties on shear strength of unsaturated soils, Vadose Zone Hydrology, published electronically, doi:10.2136/vzj2014.10.0152, 2015

In Italian:

[A21] - D’Odorico, P., Fagherazzi S., Rigon R. Frane superficiali e idrologia deiversanti: Un possibile metodo di indagine. Atti del XXVIII Convegno di Idraulica e Costruzioni Idrauliche, vol. V, pp.177-184, 2002

[A26] - Tiso, C., Bertoldi G. and R. Rigon. Il modello Geotop-SF per la determinazione dell’nnesco di fenomeni di franamento e di colata. Atti del Convegno Iterpraevent 2004, Riva del Garda, 24-28 Maggio 2004

[A27] - Rigon, R., A. Cozzini, S. Pisoni, G. Bertoldi e A. Armanini. A new simple method for the determination of the triggering of debris flows. Atti del Convegno Interpraevent 2004, Riva del Garda, 24-28 Maggio 2004

[A32] - Cordano, E., Panciera R., Rigon R., Bartolini P. Sulla soluzione diffusiva dell’equazione di Richards. Atti del XXIX Convegno di Idraulica e Costruzioni Idrauliche, Settembre 2004

[A43] Lanni C., Cordano E., Rigon R., Tarantino A., Analysis of the effect of normaland lateral subsurface water flow on the triggering of shallow landslides witha distributed hydrological model. in from geomorphology mapping to dynamic modelling, Strasbourg: CERG, 2009. Atti di: A Tribute to Prof. Dr. Theo van ASCH, Strasbourg, 6th-7th February 2009

My Past Research on Hydroinformatics, GIS and Modelling by Components

Research in the aforementioned sectors was also carried out with the implementation of  open-source software, coded in C and Java and distributed with a GPL (v 3) license.  Involvement in this topic has been deemed necessary to easy cooperative research, and to improve reuse of codes among researchers and students,  and allow an incremental development of modelling solutions (avoiding to implement again and again the same algorithms at any new generation of students).
The software has been accurately documented [eb1 to eb13] so that it can be easily reused and modified for both research and didactic purposes.  The software originally included a series of C libraries for reading, writing and insertion of comments in the data files, dynamic allocation of memory, the statistical treatment of data aimed  especially at hydrology, hydraulics, and geomorphology, but not limited to these.  On the basis of these libraries, called "Fluid Turtles" and now obsolete, was implemented the initial version GEOtop model [j24, s3]  and an initial version of  the  Horton machine [e.g. eb-3, s3].

However, the traditional software architecture of the Fluid Turtles presented various limitations. Mainly: the lack of an interface for the processing of  input data and the treatment of output data and the difficulty of maintaining and testing the software and its parts each one independently from the others, with the growing number of processes being described [e.g. A44, A49]. In fact, with the increasing number of people working on the code, and with the success of the modelling ideas among users, it became necessary to be able to test and use groups of parts of the models separately (as in JGrass-NewAGE).  It was also envisioned necessary to predispose the models  to be linked (in the future) to external models, such as, for example, those simulating the evolution of the atmospheric boundary layer, or belonging to other domains than hydrology (for instance to build a Decision Support System).
These, and other reasons [J40], have brought through a decade of work, trials and errors, on the one hand, to the development of a new GIS,  JGrass, eventually embedded in uDig,  and, on the other, to the adoption of suitable informatics infrastructure in order to restructure the models in components according to the OMS standard.

In the latest version, JGrass has partially contributed to the uDig "core" [eb10, A49, J41], while the modeling part is migrating to the jgrasstools environment (based on OMS) called Spatial Toolbox.
The last version of the tools has been actually embedded in Hydrologis' S.T.A.G.E which is a stand-alone application connectable, in principle, to any Java GIS (thinking to future versions of uDig or GvSig). The tools for terrain analysis included in STAGE  (a.k.a "The Horton Machine") are well covered by [a57]

Along the years various prototypes where developed around the above infrastructures to connect models to SQL/Geographic databases (Postgresql/Postgis), to visualise results on the Nasa World Wind virtual globe, and to allows scripting to interact with models which were presented in various conferences, and on which we could discuss with those interested.

References

In English:

[ J24] - Rigon R., Bertoldi G e T. M. Over, GEOtop: A distributed hydrological model with coupled water and energy budgets, Vol. 7, No. 3, pages 371-388

[A49] Formetta G., Antonello A., Franceschi S., David O. and Rigon R., The informatics of the hydrological modelling system JGrass-NewAge, 2012 International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software Managing Resources of a Limited Planet, Sixth Biennial Meeting, Leipzig, Germany R. Seppelt, A.A. Voinov, S. Lange, D. Bankamp (Eds.) http://www.iemss.org/society/index.php/iemss- 2012-proceedings, 2012

[J40] - Formetta G., Antonello A., Franceschi S., David O., and Rigon R., Hydrological modelling with components: A GIS-based open-source framework, Environmental Modelling & Software, 5 (2014), 190-200

[a57]- W. Abera, A. Antonello, S. Franceschi, G. Formetta, R Rigon , "The uDig Spatial Toolbox for hydro-geomorphic analysis" in Geomorphological Techniques, v. 4, n. 1 (2014), p. 1-19.

[eb2-b] Ghesla, E. and R. Rigon, A Tutorial for the Management of Digital Terrain Models, pg. 131, University of Trento, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, ISBN 10: 88-8443-155-7, 2006 (Now obsolete)

[eb3] - R.Rigon, E. Ghesla, C. Tiso and A. Cozzini, The Horton Machine, pg. viii, 136, ISBN 10:88-8443-147-6, University of Trento, 2006 (Now obsolete)

[eb4-a] Ghesla E and R. Rigon, A Tutorial for preparing GEOtop Input Files with JGrass, pg. vi, 62, ISBN 10:88-8443-153-0, University of Trento, 2006

* [eb05] Dall’Amico, A., Endrizzi, E., Gruber, S., Rigon R., The GEOtop Manual, Università di Trento, in press, 2013

In Italian:

[A44] Antonello A., Franceschi S., Formetta G., Rigon R., L’infrastruttura NewAGE per la previsione e la gestione dei bilanci idrici a scala di bacino: I - La struttura informatica in Atti XXXII Convegno di Idraulica e Costruzioni Idrauliche, Palermo, 14-17 Settembre 2010

[eb1-a] Antonello, A., S. Franceschi, A. Vitti e R. Rigon, Il Manuale JGRASS 2.0 (In Italiano), pg. 176, ISBN 10:88-8443-144-1, University of Trento, 2006 (Now obsolete)

[eb2-a] Ghesla, E. and R. Rigon, Un tutorial per il trattamento di modelli digitali del terreno con JGRASS - A Tutorial for the treatment of DEMs with JGRASS (in Italian), ISBN 10: 88-8443-146-8, 2006 (Now obsolete)

[eb4-b] Ghesla E and R. Rigon, Un tutorial per la generazione dei file di input per GEOtop utilizzando JGrass, pg. vi, 62, ISBN 10:88-8443-154-9, University of Trento, 2006 (Now obsolete)

* [eb6] Rigon R., Formetta G., Zini M., Franceschi S., Antonello A., La Horton Machine, Università di Trento, in press, 2013


* [eb7] Rigon R., Formetta G., Perathoner L., Iemma A., Franceschi S., Antonello A., Jiffle, una breve introduzione, Università di Trento, in press, 2013

* [eb8] Rigon R., Formetta G., Perathoner L., Franceschi S., Antonello A., Peakflow: teoria e pratica, Università di Trento, in press, 2013

* [eb9] Franceschi S., Rigon R., Formetta G., Perathoner L., Antonello A., Trentop, Manuale d’uso, Università di Trento, in press, 2013

* [eb10] - Antonello A., Franceschi S., Rigon R., Formetta G., Perathoner L., uDig: Installare lo Spatial Toolboox, Università di Trento, in press, 2013

[eb11] - Iemma, A., Antonello A., Franceschi S., Rigon R., Formetta G., Perathoner L., uDig walkthroughs, Lavorare con i formati di GRASS in uDig, Università di Trento, in press, 2013