Positions in snow modelling, Po River basin hydrology, soil-plant-atmosphere interactions and GEOframe system development @UniTrento

 Dear All,

I am seeking motivated  master graduated interested in working in areas related to Snow modelling, Po River basin hydrology, Soil-plant-atmosphere interactions and GEOframe system development. Below are some exciting thesis opportunities, each with potential for continuation into a Ph.D. program. Post doc positions could be considered as well for appropriate persons.

1. Snow Modelling (SUNSET PRIN Project)

This topic focuses on snow dynamics modeling using GEOframe-NewAGE and GEOtop, within the SUNSET PRIN project (Details). Opportunities include fieldwork, guided by Prof. Stefano Ferraris (University of Turin), with Dr. John Mohd Wani as co-supervisor.

2. Po River Basin Projects (ADBPo Collaboration)

The Po River Basin thesis topics align with the long-term collaboration with the Basin Authority of River Po (Details). These projects could lead to Ph.D. opportunities and professional roles.

Topics include:

- Modeling Romagna Catchments for Drought and Flood Prevention

  Focused on hourly-scale modeling for water management.

- Co-Supervisor: Ing. Gaia Roati (Po Basin Authority)

- Includes periods at the Po Basin Authority in Parma.

- Earth Observation for Po River Basin Calibration

  Systematic use of satellite data to validate and improve GEOframe-NewAGE models.

- Part of: SpaceItUp! PNRR (Italian Space Agency) and an upcoming ESA project

- Collaboration: Ing. Hossein Salehi, Fondazione Edmund Mach, and Prof. Manuela Girotto (UC Berkeley).

3. Land-Surface Interactions with the use of the GEOSPACE system and its development (EPFL collaboration, ESA Projects, EU Projects)

- Modeling Transpiration and Soil-Atmosphere Interactions

  Utilize GEOframe-NewAGE and GEOSPACE for basin-scale modeling.

- Co-Supervisor: Dr. Concetta D’Amato (EPFL, Sion Campus)

- Includes a potential study period in Sion.

- Depending on the specific topic other collaboration should be envisioned

Topics include:

- Estimating the effects of evaporation and transpiration at Po scale, integrating GEOSPACE with Earth Observation.

- Understanding the effects of soil evolution under the action of biota and under global warming.

- New parameterizations of the atmosphere - plant interactions

4. Informatics-Oriented GEOframe Development (SIM Project)

- Integrating Large Language Models with GEOframe

  Explore the potential of Generative AI for improving user interaction and programming within GEOframe.

- Transforming GEOframe into a DARTH

  Enhance the GEOframe infrastructure and Object Modelling System (OMS) codebase.

- Co-Supervisors: Prof. Giuseppe Formetta and Dr. Olaf David (Colorado State University)

- Includes a potential study period in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Additional Information

All theses involve using and extending GEOframe tools, requiring proficiency in Python and Java. Coding skills are especially critical for informatics-oriented topics.

These projects provide an excellent foundation for doctoral studies and professional development in hydrology, environmental modeling, and computational science.

Please feel free to share this information and contact me for further details.

Best regards, 

Riccardo Rigon

riccardo<dot> rigon<@>unitn<dot>it

The anticipated salary for pre-doctoral and Ph.D. students is €1,350 per month (net), plus an additional €3,000 annually for supplementary activities. For postdoctoral researchers, the net annual salary ranges from €24,000 to €30,000, depending on individual qualifications and experience. Additional income opportunities may also be available. The cost of living in the region is more affordable compared to many other European countries.

IMPORTANT !!!!

P.S. - In your response, please specify which of the above proposals you are interested in pursuing, along with a brief explanation of your motivation. Send your CV with your age and gender included. If you do not have prior experience with the GEOframe system,, we kindly request that you first enroll in our  GEOframe School (we are happy to waive your subscription fees). Please complete the enrollment and mention in your communication that you have done so.

The school has already covered the installation process and some theoretical aspects, but all materials are available online for self-paced learning. The next session will take place in January, and individuals currently in Italy are encouraged to attend in person.

Two possibile positions, if the right people show up

We are once again looking for exceptional individuals to join our team for PhD (3 years) or postdoc (2 years) positions.

Position 1: GEOframe-NewAGE System Application and Methodologies to build a Po Digital Twin

This role focuses on the implementation and application of the GEOframe-NewAGE system to the Po River Basin. You will assist the team in finalizing the calibration and analysis of the hydrology of the Po catchment for the period 1990-1991, with exciting outcomes expected in climatology, drought studies, and hydroinformatics applications. This project is not purely applicative as it may initially seem. It aims to encompass numerous methodological aspects and offers a wealth of research opportunities, along with the data needed to pursue them.

Position 2: Earth Observations and GEOSPACE System Development

This position focuses on integrating Earth Observations into the GEOSPACE system, with further development and applications in the Po River Basin and the Val di Non (Noce River catchment). The primary objective is to advance the integration of high-resolution remote sensing with hydrological modeling, while also improving our land-surface modeling capabilities. The role involves exploring and testing various transpiration models, incorporating increasing levels of physical realism and plant physiology to enhance model reliability.

We encourage interested candidates to explore my blog, where you’ll find detailed information about our working methods, the tools we use, and the philosophy we follow. An insightful candidate will recognize how well we might work together by reviewing the contents they find.

If you’re interested, please reach out to us at abouthydrology@gmail.com.

Ph.D. position available for working on the Enhancing GEOframe to deal with anthropogenic influences on the hydrologic cycle of Tevere and Adige River

The candidate will be asked to extend the GEOframe system with tools to understand the anthropogenic impacts on the hydrological cycle on Adige and Tevere basins via the integration of hydrological modelling and satellite/ground based observations. They will start from an already existing solid base (operational at the ARPAB and implemented in various catchment around the world) and tries to answer the following research questions: how much human activities is impacting mountainous region and which will be the main challenges in the future ? How water resources should be allocated to respond to the future needs ? How to best manage water resources among the competing interests ?The Ph.D. candidate will take care of the implementation of a suite of modelling solutions for the Adige and the Tevere river basin with specific focus on some subcatchments.

In general the research activities will aim to fuse information from any available source and especially remote sensing of snow, soil moisture, surface temperature, vegetation with model components of new type developed inside the GEOframe platform The project is part of a wide spectrum of collaborative research activities between UniTrento, IRPI-PG and EURAC.
The candidate will take care of implementing, besides the code, the appropriate procedures for continuous integration of the evolving source code, and s/he will be also asked to maintain a regular rate of commits to the common open platform. Despite these conditions, and being free and open source, the code will be intellectual property by the coder. This will be guaranteed also by the components-based infrastructure offered by OMS3, which allows to better define the contributions of anyone.
The implementation part will be followed, accompanied by testing activities, either for mathematical consistency, than for physical consistency with experiments and field measurements.

The Ph.D. student is intended to produce, besides working and tested codes, also at least three papers in major journals (VQR Class A), of which, at least one as first Author. Duration of the doctoral studies could be three or four years.

Further information of the policies of the Trento research group can be found:

• To my students
• Working with us
• The scaring version of “working with us"
• About doing a Ph.D.
• Why Open Source ?
• Going beyond the present state of Art Of Hydrological Modeling (since 2011 but still valid)
• Authorship
• Software guidelines

Supervisor of the Ph.D. will be Riccardo Rigon, Christian Massari and Silvia Barbetta. Same information can be found at the AboutHydrology blog.

Information for application can be found at the AES doctoral studies page. Please pay attention to the deadline for applications.

To inquiring students

Since a few years, I am receiving emails from students inquiring for the possibility of doing Ph.D studies with me. The letter is usually of this type :

"Dear Dr. Riccardo Rigon,

Hope my email finds you well.My name is Donald Duck and I would like to hereby ask about the possibility of working under your supervision as a PhD student. I have received my MSc degree in * and **.

Sometimes, the candidate also says something like:

"I possess 5 years of work experience as a researcher, instructor and Environmental Consultant and have a related research background which led me to present 18 conference papers, 2 published papers and 3 submitted papers which are detailed in my CV.”

They continues,

"I was reading about your recent works on the website and due to the alignment of my research interests with your expertise in Environmental Engineering and the academic position of your university, I believe the valuable experience that I would have under your supervision will provide me with the ground to achieve my academic goals.
I am deeply interested to begin a PhD program at your university  [...]"

CV: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Duck

RI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhBf4ClJwoY

Best regards,

Donald Duck

Receiving many of this letters, I have prepared an answer below, which I hope is useful to clarify some points and my feelings. 

I do research in Hydrology and you can be enrolled to our doctoral school by participating to a call, usually in the first months of every year. The Applicants are examined by a committee that tries to  choose the bests. We are always looking for outstanding students and dedicated people (not only me but also my colleagues).

For producing an endorsement for a candidate I do not personally know,  and forwarding it to the selecting committee,  I require the student to study the material of the last Winter School on GEOframe (on catchments studies)  or of the Summer School (on soil-plants-atmosphere interactions, process-based modelling), or apply to one of the Schools. I can wave their school fees if  they specify they wants to try to be enroll as a doctoral student. 

If the applicant agrees,  I and the group of GEOframers will dedicate some of their time helping  in the installations of  our software and eventually perform some case study. This application can be in the field of catchments hydrology (on the example of Dr. Abera papers cited below) or applications using the tools more explicitly developed to work on the Critical Zone (Richards equations coupled to the energy budget and evapotranspiration) on which I can give material and direction.
After the completion of the above task, I will be able to weigh their skills, to know how they can work in  my group and to consider them as interesting candidates for a Ph.D. with us (this does not mean they is not an interesting and skilled candidate for other groups or colleagues).
The enrollment though is not guaranteed, since the selection is  a public competition and many apply. However, my endorsement can help. Besides, it can be used also elsewhere, since it will be provided with a certification of having completed the GEOframe studies, and the candidate certainly did not waste their time having learned something useful for their hydrological career.  

I cover various topics in hydrology, and, all of them are explained in my blog AboutHydrology. Therefore, the astute candidate has to consider to browse what I do. Besides advancing theoretical parts of Hydrology, usually a Ph.D. student in my group is intended to produce working and tested codes (i.e. doing programming). All the code developed will be regularly uploaded to Github (or similar platform), inside the GEOframe community space, and will be Open Source according to the GPL v3 license. I am not usually interested in  doing research with SWAT, HEC_HMS or other hydrological models, different from those I develop. 

Further information of the policies of the research group can be found:

• To my students
• Working with us
• The scaring version of “working with us"
• About doing a Ph.D.
• Why Open Source ?
• Going beyond the present state of Art Of Hydrological Modeling (since 2011 but still valid)
• Authorship policies in the group
• Software documentation and autorship policy (the latter included at the bottom of the notebook)

P.S. 0 - For getting a Ph.D. opportunity or a postdoc position, one valuable way  is to subscribe to the AboutHydrology google group where you can find appropriate announcements

P.S.  I- About coding - The candidate will take care of implementing, besides the code, the appropriate procedures for continuous integration of the evolving source code, and s/he will be also asked to maintain a regular rate of commits to the common open platform. Despite these conditions, and being free and open source, the code will be intellectual property by the coder.
This will be guaranteed also by the components-based infrastructure offered by OMS3, which allows to better define the contributions of anyone.The implementation part will be followed, accompanied by testing activities, either for mathematical consistency, than for physical consistency with experiments and field measurements.The Ph.D. student is intended to produce, besides working and tested codes, also at least three papers in major journals (VQR Class A), of which, at least one as first Author. Duration of the doctoral studies is three years.

P.S. II - I am also considering with favor:
Applicants who wants to apply to build the new GEOtop snow model but with attention to forest-snow interactions.
Who wants to work on the infrastructure of the OMS3, GEOframe systems.
Who wants to exploit the capabilities of the GEOframe system to pursue the modelling of the river Adige (and/or other rivers in the world), including human infrastructures.

References

Abera, Wuletawu, Giuseppe Formetta, Marco Borga, and Riccardo Rigon. 2017. “Estimating the Water Budget Components and Their Variability in a Pre-Alpine Basin with JGrass-NewAGE.” Advances in Water Resources 104 (June): 37–54.

Abera, Wuletawu, Giuseppe Formetta, Luca Brocca, and Riccardo Rigon. 2017. “Modeling the Water Budget of the Upper Blue Nile Basin Using the JGrass-NewAge Model System and Satellite Data.” Hydrology and Earth System Sciences 21 (6): 3145–65.

Tubini, Niccolò, and Riccardo Rigon. 2021. “Implementing the Water, HEat and Transport Model in GEOframe WHETGEO-1D v.1.0: Algorithms, Informatics, Design Patterns, Open Science Features, and 1D Deployment.” https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2021-163.

Some new Ph.D. positions

The new call for the 2019 doctoral position is out. I am interested in topic "D1/D2 - Agricultural, Environmental and hydro-meteorological sciences and engineering”. There are a few available doctoral grants which will be given to a selection of applicants, according to the rule specified in the call. I am interested in students who wants actively collaborate to the WATZON Prin Project. So please peruse the WATZONE project's pages to write your personal  project which the appllication requires.

Overview of the state of art of our topic

Plants water-use strategies are driven by plant functional traits (PFT) (examples are leaf size, toughness and longevity, seed size and dispersal mode, canopy height and structure, capacity for nitrogen fixation) (Mitchell et al., 2008) and in recent years, plant-physiology studies provided an increasingly detailed knowledge of plants behaviour (Schymanski and Or, 2017), but only some of them started to be inserted in ecohydrological models (e.g. Fatichi et al., 2016). Models simulating plant-hydraulic processes are still rare and confined to specific studies (Hölä et al., 2009; Mackay et al., 2015; Nikinmaa et al., 2014). Other studies account explicitly for topographic attributes and lateral water and mass exchanges (Ivanov et al., 2008; Shen et al., 2013; Tague et al., 2013), but their treatment of plant processes is often oversimplified (Zhou et al., 2013). In mountain terrain, even the effect of plot-scale (0.01-0.1 km2) spatial variability of the energy fluxes is still largely not understood (Rollinson and Kaye, 2015) notwithstanding pioneering stud- ies which account for various feedbacks are available, which show that vegetation productivity and water use do not change linearly through spatial gradients (Niedrist et al., 2016).
Research questions addressed

1.  How specific plant water-use strategies can be implemented in hydrological models ?,
2. Which is the relative role of biotic (PFT) versus abiotic (soils, topography, climate) processes in determining the spatial and temporal variability of ET and soil water?
3.  Which is the right level of complexity necessary in models to upscale R3 results from plants to catchments?
4. How to take advantage of a combination of advanced multi-sensor, multiscale observations to constrain eco-hydrological models and improve their spatial accuracy?
5. How to leverage recent theories of transport to implement the solutes dynamics in plants ?


Other information

The candidate will take care of implementing, besides the code, the appropriate procedures for continuous integration of the evolving source code, and s/he will be also asked to maintain a regular rate of commits to the common open platform. Despite these conditions, and being free and open source, the code will be intellectual property by the coder. This will be guaranteed also by the components-based infrastructure offered by OMS3, which allows to better define the contributions of anyone.
The implementation part will be followed, accompanied by testing activities, either for mathematical consistency, and for physical consistency with experiments and field measurements.
The Ph.D. student is intended to produce, besides working and tested codes, also at least three papers in major journals (VQR Class A), of which, at least one as first Author.
All the code developed will be done in Github (or similar platform), inside the GEOframe community and will be Open Source according to the GPL v3 license.

The candidate will take care of implementing, besides the code, the appropriate procedures for continuous integration of the evolving source code, and s/he will be also asked to maintain a regular rate of commits to the common open platform. Despite these conditions, and being free and open source, the code will be intellectual property by the coder. This will be guaranteed also by the components-based infrastructure offered by OMS3, which allows to better define the contributions of anyone.The implementation part will be followed, accompanied by testing activities, either for mathematical consistency, than for physical consistency with experiments and field measurements.The Ph.D. student is intended to produce, besides working and tested codes, also at least three papers in major journals (VQR Class A), of which, at least one as first Author. Duration of the doctoral studies is three years.

Further information of the policies of the research group can be found:

• To my students
• Working with us
• The scaring version of “working with us"
• About doing a Ph.D.
• Why Open Source ?
• Going beyond the present state of Art Of Hydrological Modeling (since 2011 but still valid)

P.S. - I am also considering:

• Applicants who wants to apply to build the new GEOtop snow model but with attention to forest-snow interactions.
• Who wants to work on the infrastructure of the OMS3, GEOframe systems.
• Who wants to exploit the capabilities of the GEOframe system to pursue the modelling of the river Adige (and/or other rivers in the world), including human infrastructures.

A new topic for a Ph.D. in Hydrology at University of Trento. Modelling water flows under phase transitions

This study starts from a pore scale view of flow in soil and aggregate it at the representative elementary volume, (REV), scale according to statistical assumptions, to obtain new forms of the Richards equation. Flows are assumed to happen under normal and/or freezing conditions and under evapotranspiration demand. Transitions from unsaturated to saturated conditions will be properly accounted in all types of flow. The theoretical work at the basis of this proposal is contained in Dall’Amico et al. 2011 and Tubini, 2017. At the beginning the system will be modeled by coupling the water budget equation and the energy budget equation, neglecting vapor mass budget, as usually done. The candidate should take care of integrating the equations with appropriate and sound numerical methods that guarantee mass and energy conservation, following the footsteps of the work by Casulli and Zanolli (2010) and work for possible extensions.

There are various possible further development of this research. One is to couple the water and energy budget with surface waters simultaneously solved, another is to deal with water vapor explicitly. Others developments could come ongoing.

The informatics behind the code will follow (and, in case co-develops) the developments pursued by dott. Serafin, Ph.D. work inside the Object Modelling System, version 3 or subsequent (OMS3, David et al., 2013), that will take care implicitly of execution of parallel processes and will provide various services to computation (e.g. Serafin, 2016).

All the code developed will be done in Github (or similar platform), inside the GEOframe community and will be Open Source according to the GPL v3 license.
The candidate will take care of implementing, besides the code, the appropriate procedures for continuous integration of the evolving source code, and s/he will be also asked to maintain a regular rate of commits to the common open platform. Despite these conditions, and being free and open source, the code will be intellectual property by the coder. This will be guaranteed also by the components-based infrastructure offered by OMS3, which allows to better define the contributions of anyone. (See also: For incoming students, The tales of open source codes).

The implementation part will be followed, accompanied by testing activities, either for mathematical consistency, than for physical consistency with experiments and field measurements. These will be made especially by Dr. Stephan Gruber (GS) group at Carleton University, where the candidate will be asked to spend some periods od his/her doctorate. Participation to experimental activities will not be intended to be purely passive, the candidate will be asked to actively participate as much as feasible and reasonable to any part of the research.

The Ph.D. student is intended to produce, besides working and tested codes, also at least three papers in major journals (VQR Class A), of which, at least one as first Author.  Duration of the doctoral studies could be three or four years.

This project can enter either the curriculum C (Environmental Engineering) or the curriculum A (Modelling and Simulation) of our doctoral school.

For information please refers to riccardo.rigon <at> unitn.it

Essential References

Casulli, V., & Zanolli (2010). A nested newton-type algorithm for finite volume methods solving Richards' equation in mixed form. SIAM J. SCI. Comput., 32(4), 2225–2273.

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.

David, O., Ascough, J. C., II, Lloyd, W., Green, T. R., Rojas, K. W., Leavesley, G. H., & Ahuja, L. R. (2012). A software engineering perspective on environmental modeling framework design: The Object Modeling System. Environmental Modelling and Software, 39, 1–13. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2012.03.006

Serafin, F., About graphs, DSL and replicable research, 2016, http://abouthydrology.blogspot.co.at/2016/11/about-graphs-dsl-and-replicable.html

Tubini, N. (2017, March 31). Theoretical Progress in freezing-thawing process studies. (R. Rigon, F. Serafin, & S. Gruber, Advisors.).

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.

A Ph.D position at University of Bozen on: Short and medium term hydrological forecasting for hydropower production

The candidate is assumed to produce forecasting and scenarios, with the modelling system JGrass-NewAGE for supporting the organisation and analyses of economical (and other) issues concerning the hydropower production in the Northern Adige River Basin. She/He is also assumed to be able advance the knowledge on phenomena that stay behind the production of runoff, and, in general, to advance the knowledge of  sustainable energy production in mountains area.

He/She will be supervised by professor Maurizio Righetti and co-supervised by Riccardo Rigon (GS, RG) and Bruno Majone (RG). Programming skills are required in order to be able to add appropriate modules (as open source contributions)  to the existing hydrological system. R knowledge for statistical analysis will be considered as a title of merit.

She/He will be inserted in a dynamic working group of Bozen and Trento Universities which includes also Professor Alberto Bellin (GS, RG). 

Deadline for submission June 8th.

Other information can be found at:

http://www.unibz.it/it/public/research/phd/PhD_32nd_cycle.html

http://www.unibz.it/en/sciencetechnology/progs/phd/sustainable/default.html

Dear incoming students who want to work with me

In these days, there are many students that write and candidate themselves to a Ph.D. position. I thank these students for the attention they give to me. However, they should read  what I write below carefully.

I want to tell them that in Italy, the procedure is not like in other States where the professor choses directly his/her Ph.D at any time of the year. We have a selection (meaning a competition) to which they should apply. In my Department, in any case, the professor has to say that, for a certain year, he/she wants to support a student, and has to co-finance the grant. So the fact that you show up and start a discussion is positive.

Regarding the matter, these students send me their CV which is sometime notable but rarely coincident with my research directions.  I do not want to be brutal, however, they have to refocus on the idea that I work hard  to pursue my own research, and, if they want to work with me, they need to like what I like. So in their presentation to me a statement like, "I would really like to work with you on the topic [put here one topic on which I work]",  is relieving me from some pain and shows that you are a smart man or woman.  Occasionally I also organise summer schools that are a good way to get in touch with me, and a place were I can evaluate you directly. [We can often give up your tuition fees (but we do not have money to support your travelling).]

Usually, I am not interested in river hydraulics, nor in sediment transport, not even in computational fluid mechanics (except maybe to integrate Navier-Stokes equations). Neither I am a structural engineer or a civil engneer, in strict sense. Other people at my Department are very good in the above topics, and they should be searched if the student want to pursue  those researches instead than mine. 

I am a hydrologist, and my interest are more or less depicted here, in these posts. What I am really working in these days are the Jgrass-NewAGE system (see also Wuletawu Abera defense post) and the informatics to build the new GEOtop. In perspective, I am also very interested in the thermodynamics (theory and implementation) of hydrological processes.

I pretend that a candidate has programming skills in Java or C++ (and Python), or the willing to pursue them. All the code my group develops is intended to be free software, and must be produced with appropriate documentation. Do not bother me, if you do not agree with this or you do not want to write code.
The reflection about research reproducibility and replicability is part itself of  my research work and, in my view "open-sourceness" is part of the process to obtain them.

To have an idea of my research see the projects I recently presented (WATER-MIX, PRECISE, WATSUP, Adige-CARITRO) for a possible funding. 

To see what I mean for a Ph.D. you can read here. It can be exciting, but it deserves the right mental and general attitude.

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. 

Two possible Ph.D. positions available

Dear reader,

in the new call of our doctoral school in Trento I proposed two topics which could be of interest for some of your friends, students or people you know. Here they are:

Distributed Modelling of the Hydrological Cycle at large scales (including human impacts)

This regards mainly the development of the  JGrass-NewAGE for the complete closure of the hydrological budgets, in medium to large scale modelling. This requires the implementation and testing of new physical-statistical model of the various terms of the hydrological cycle, and their application to case studies at the scale of hundreds to thousands of square kilometers. At the  moment the model has a first implementation of all the processes that is going to be thoroughly  tested, and the main interest in this research is to go beyond the simple forecasting of hydrological quantities (in space-time) to achieve  the estimation of error bounds in the predictions with the application of appropriate calibration methods, and data assimilation procedures.  The doctoral work is intended to achieve also the application of models and tools to a real case (which could be the river Adige) and will be pursued in coordination with ISTAT, the Italian Ministry of Environment, and the appropriate river Authorities.

The candidates are required to have good programming skills, especially in Java and R (or the will to pursue them), to improve the numerical modeling within the framework of the JGrass-NewAGE system. It is intended that all the tangible work in programming tools is produced as free software, and using free software.  Previous outcomes of the research line can be found at: 

http://abouthydrology.blogspot.it/search/label/JGrass-NewAGE

Distributed Modelling and Data Assimilation of the Cryospheric processes

This study involves the modelling and forecasting of the evolution of the snow cover working with the model GEOtop.  Previous Ph.D researchers implemented a one dimensional energy budget of both the snowpack and  freezing soil. They also posed the bases for  further theoretical and numerical improvements of the model, to a 3D version, and eventually including also different constitutive relations, which could be pursued in this research.

The present proposal is especially dedicated to include (or embed) GEOtop modelling with a data assimilation system dedicated to real-time forecasting of the snow cover, depth, and status. The Ph.D. work could be oriented to assimilate either ground data than remote sensing data. 

The work will be made in coordination with Mountain-eering S.r.l, a spin-off of the University of Trento, and Stephan Gruber of University of Carleton (CA). The candidates are required to have good programming skills in Java/C++ (or the will to pursue them) to improve the numerical modeling within GEOtop (C++), and the system that is going to be built around it (Java). It is intended that all the tangible work in programming tools is produced as free software, and using free software.

Information about GEOtop can be found at:

http://abouthydrology.blogspot.it/search/label/GEOtop

Information about my research on Cryospheric processes at:

http://abouthydrology.blogspot.it/2012/09/my-past-research-on-cryopheric-hydrology.html

As general attitude in my research I believe that research must be reproducible:

http://abouthydrology.blogspot.it/search/label/Reproducible%20Research

and I require the same discipline to my Ph.D. students and collaborators. 

All my research topics, besides these two above are available at:

http://abouthydrology.blogspot.it/2011/06/research-topics-for-my-next-20-years.html

Programming skills and attitudes (at least to acquire programming skills) are mandatory. Knowledge of commercial softwares not necessary (and its use discouraged along the Ph.D. since, for the core research, I use softwares evolved by my group and my former students for almost everything). 

All the best,

riccardo rigon


Further information can be obtained by writing to claudia.fraizingher (at) unitn.it

She already wrote to some applicant:



" Dear ***,

with regard to your e-mail below, we inform you that the applications for our Doctorate programme are managed only via the online system. Please check our website: http://www.unitn.it/en/dricam/29815/current-call. The call for the 29th cycle of the Doctoral School in Civil, Environmental and Mechanical Engineering for the academic year 2013/2014 is open, application deadline is September 30, 2013. All the details relating to the application procedure are specified in the call (read it carefully). The list of research subjects proposed for this edition will be available in the next few days.

I also inform you that the assessment of qualifications and the oral examinations for candidates living abroad who wish to be interviewed in the country where they are currently living, can be arranged with a videoconference, subject to approval by the Head of the School. In this case you will have to complete the online section of the application “Offsite examination“ indicating the reason for such request (work, study, permanent residency, etc.), a Skype account and the address and phone number of a university or diplomatic representation as well as the name of a third person who will confirm your identity at the beginning of the examination. In any case you find all the information on-line. "