Research in Arctic Permafrost. A new start

In the rapidly changing Arctic, understanding permafrost behavior is critical for infrastructure, ecosystems, and climate science. Marianna Tavonatti's master's thesis at the University of Trento has delivered some achievements that points towards the advance our understanding of Canadian Arctic permafrost dynamics and provide essential tools for climate adaptation.

Permafrost—permanently frozen ground—covers 24% of the Northern Hemisphere and is rapidly thawing due to climate change. This thesis focused on the Canadian Arctic near the Inuvik-Tuktoyaktuk Highway, using advanced computer modeling to understand how permafrost responds to changing temperatures over time scales from decades to seasons. 

Permafrost - https://www.maggiebaylor.com/permafrost

Marianna Thesis covers: 

1. GEOtop Model Implementation: First comprehensive application of the GEOtop model for Canadian Arctic permafrost, successfully validated against real ground temperature data.

2. Historical Analysis: 73-year simulation (1950-2023) revealing clear evidence of accelerating permafrost warming and active layer deepening.

3. Future Projections: Advanced climate scenarios showing significant future changes in permafrost stability with direct implications for infrastructure planning.

4. Advanced Theoretical Framework: Enhanced understanding of frozen soil physics, improving how we model phase changes in complex soil systems.

5. Methodological Innovation: Created an integrated GlobSim-GEOtop modeling chain applicable to Arctic regions worldwide.

6. Practical Applications: Provided quantitative data essential for Arctic infrastructure design and climate adaptation strategies.

7. Scientific Contributions: Advanced climate change understanding with implications for carbon cycling and global climate feedbacks.

However, the best things is to read the thesis that you can get by clicking on the figure. 

Marianna's work establishes a foundation for future advancement in Arctic permafrost science. The research identifies specific opportunities for enhanced spatial modeling, improved climate projections, and expanded ecosystem coupling—providing a clear roadmap for continued innovation in this critical field.

As the Arctic continues to experience rapid environmental change, research like Marianna's becomes increasingly vital for understanding system responses and supporting sustainable development in one of Earth's most climate-sensitive regions. 

Saving Water Growing Crops - A M.S. Thesis by Nicola D'Alberton

Climate change will affect the groundwater availability in the next decades and impose new challenges to save water in agriculture. 

The project Saving Water Growing Crops takes place in a rural mountain area of Lebanon and is focused on promoting a new efficient smart irrigation technology and the rehabilitation of three rainwater harvesting reservoirs (ponds). This could lead to significant water savings, and thus increase the resilience of the communities to climate change. 

The present study aims to analyse and map the situation in the target area, to model the current situation and design different scenarios to estimate the benefits given by the different project solutions.

Further developments are discussed to obtain more reliable model to represent the processes and evaluate the efficiency of the intervention.  

The results showed that the implementation of the smart irrigation technology and the rehabilitation of the catchment system of the ponds may save a significant amount of water limiting the dependency on groundwater. Please find the thesis manuscript by clicking on the Figure above.

Advances in permafrost modelling: application of the Nested Newton algorithm for solving the heat equation

This is to enlighten the very good job Enrico Borinato did in its Master Thesis in Environmental Engineering. He worked especially on top of the PhD work by Niccolò Tubini and the suggestions and supervision of Prf. Stephan Gruber, expanding in various directions his.  Please find below the Abstract of the Thesis. Clicking on the figure, you can access the manuscript. 

Abstract

Permafrost is a product of cold climatic conditions and is widespread in high-latitude and high-elevation environments. Permafrost is a key component of the cryosphere through its influence on energy exchanges, hydrological processes, natural hazards and carbon budgets. With the increasing awareness of climate change and global warming also the interest on relation climate-permafrost has been rising. A correct knowledge of permafrost behavior allows us to predict the evolution of environments characterized by perennially frozen ground and thus the impacts due to climate changes. Hence the importance to develop the right tools to study this phenomenon. 

One aim of this work is to implement the problem of the heat conduction with phase change in a numerical code. The novelty is in using a new type of Newton's algorithm (Casulli & Zanolli, 2010) in combination with finite element method implemented in FEniCS, an open-source computing platform for solving partial differential equations. 

Then also different analysis on thermal conductivity parameterization and soil freezing characteristic curve have been studied using FreeThaw1D, a Java code in which some soil thermal conductivity models have been implemented.

A few topics for a Master thesis in Hydrology

After the series about Meledrio I thought that each one of the post actually identifies at least one Thesis topic:

• The influence of slopes and terrain characteristics on the hydrologic response
• The role of geologic and or vegetational information (and the methods to disclose it)
• The filtering of time series data
• The implementation and study  of a reference model to which compare the others
• The role of sediment in flood formation

Actually, each one of them could be material for more than one Thesis, depending the direction we want to take. All the Theses topics assume that JGrass-NewAGE is the tool used for investigations.

Actually there are some spinoff of those topics:

• Using machine learning to set part of model inputs and/or 
• Doing hydrological modeling with machine learning
• Preprocessing and treating (via Python or Java) satellite data as input of JGrass-NewAGE (a systematisation of some work made by Wuletawu Abera on Posina cacthment and/or Blue Nile)
• Implementation of the new version of JGrass-NewAGE on val di Sole
• Using satellite data, besides geometric features, to extract river networks
• Snow models intercomparison (GEOtop and those in JGrass-NewAGE, with reference to work done by Stefano Tasin and Gabriele Massera) 

Other to other Hydrological topics:

• Mars (also here) and planetary Hydrology (with GEOtop or some of its evolutions which account for different temperature ranges and other fluid fluxes)
• Copying with Evapotranspiration and irrigation at various scales
• Copying the carbon cycle to the hydrological cycle (either in GEOtop or in JGrass-NewAGE)

Other possible topics regarding water management:

• Hypothesis on the management of reservoir for optimal water management in river Adige.
• Managing Urban Waters Complexity

Other possible topics regards, on a more theoretical (mathematical-physical) side:

•  Exploiting the travel time analysis of reservoir-based travel time theories
•  (Information) Entropy fluxes in the water cycle
•  Sensitivity Analysis of model parameters (through analytical-numerical techniques)

On the side of informatics:

• Optimal subdivision of grids in parts for parallel computing of environmental flows
• Exploiting the Basic Model Interface and data abstraction for models' components connection
• Making easier to manage the fully distributed-graph-based version of Jgrass-NewAGE (I/O data treatment and their visualisation)
• Porting the Orlandini-Moretti methods of terrain analysis to OMS - Horton Machine)

For who wants to work with us on the Master thesis, the rules to follow are those for Ph.D. students, even if to a minor extent. See here:

• To my students
• Dear incoming students who want to work with me 
• Working with us
• Essential for hydrologists
• The Tale of Open Source Codes
• Theory and practice of reproducible research
• The four hours rule

Modelling discharge in an Alpine basin with JGrass-NewAGE

This and a related post reports about the Master thesis by Niccolò Tubini and Stefano Tasin. It was a couple years ago that I graduate my last Master guy, and I am happy with these two graduations.
Stefano thesis is in Italian. So I am summarising it a little bit below.
JGrass-NewAGE has a a snow module that was developed by Giuseppe Formetta (GS). Giuseppe developed also a component called  Adige-Hymod for runoff estimation. The two were not tested conjointly (well, they were), and we would like to have a new case to understand more about the behaviour of the model and sharpen the methods we use with it.

 
Stefano did it, making leverage on the NewAGE database of river Adige and using, side by side with NewAGE, GEOtop as the true to reproduce in matter of snow. Other directions could have taken, but Stefano chose this one with excellent results. He had in mind a relatively small basin in the Norther part of Italy that was known to be dominated by snow (and glacier melt) and he wanted to investigate how much of discharge depends upon snow melting. The figure above is one of his results, which shows an excellent discharge fitting and quite impressive demonstration of how snowmelt counts in this case. Thinking that snow on the Alps is going to almost disappear cause the climate change, the basin will go to a quite large change in the discharge regime. It is foreseeable that winter discharge will grow in place of the summer ones, with possible modifications of the discharges distributions.
The thesis and the simulations files used are here.

Theoretical progress in freezing-thawing processes studies

This and a related post reports about the Master thesis by Niccolò Tubini and Stefano Tasin. It was a couple years ago that I graduate my last Master guy, and I am happy with these two graduations.
Niccolò thesis is about modelling permafrost.

I already worked on it during the Ph.D. thesis by Matteo Dall'Amico, obtaining interesting results, which were published in this 2011 paper. From it we built. Initially the idea was that the work by Matteo dall’Amico was clear enough to go directly to a full three-dimensional implementation of 3D algorithms on a unstructured grid. That was actually not the case an we had to rework all the theory. I do not want to waste its reading. So, if you want to know the story, please click here. 

The presentation Niccolò gave for his Master (Laurea) degree is here.

Patterns for the application of modern informatics to the integration of PDEs: the case of the Boussinesq Equation

Today Francesco Serafin graduated finishing his master in civil and environmental  engineering. In brief, the scope of his thesis was to implement a series of classes, eventually ported to OMS, to solve the groundwater Boussinesq equation (under the link, please find also specific reference to previous work), but with a more large scope to envision an object oriented structure which could work for any PDE. Let Francesco's introduction talk:

"Mathematical models play a fundamental role in many scientific and engineering fields in today’s world. They are used for example in geotechnics to evalute the hillslope stability, in weather science to predict weather trends and produce weather reports, in structural design to study the resistance to stress, and in fluid dynamics to compute fluid flows and air flows.

Consequently mathematical models are evolving all the time: more and more new numerical methods are being invented to solve the Partial Differential Equations (PDE)s that describe physical problems with increasing precision, and more and more complex and efficient processor units are being created to reduce the computational time.
Therefore, the code into which the mathematical models are translated has to be “dynamic” in order to be easily updated on the basis of the continuous developments (Formetta et al. (2014) [16]).
On the other hand, completely different physical problems are often de- scribed using similar PDEs. For this reason, the numerical methods which provide solutions to different problems can be the same. This suggest the implementation of an IT infrastructure that hosts a standard structure for solving PDEs and that can serve various disciplines with the minimum of hassles.

This work is focused on the application of what is envisioned above, with the main purpose of the creation of an abstract code for implementing every type of mathematical model described by PDEs.

We work on hydrological topics but we hope to design a structure of general interest. Obviously the final goal of any work of this type is to find a proper numerical solver, and therefore, part of the thesis is devoted to the analysis of the problem under scrutiny, and the description of the solution found."

The thesis can be found here. The presentation given at the thesis discussion is here.  The code can be found here.