Theoretical and Numerical Tools for Studying the Critical Zone from Plots to Catchments

 What a valuable work is the thesis by Niccolò Tubini, here presented in its draft.  It covers works in hydrology of the critical zone, numerics, programming, software engineering, open science methods. Having a so wide horizon of interest it could  not be easy to grasp in all of these details, but it is well written and, we hope inspiring. As the Author, Ph.D. candidate says: "In the following we suggest that studying the CZ requires tools that are not yet readily available to researchers; then we propose one of our own. These tools should be flexible enough to allow the quick embedding of advancements in science"

Who wants to access the draft, can click on the figure of the Thesis first page below.

The Thesis included the work present in the two submitted paper by Niccolò,  on The Cryosphere and a second one presented in GMDD regarding WHETGEO-1D.  Whilst a thesis being considered kind of a definitive work, this one remains very much a work in progress with the extensions of the codes foreseen to arrive soon and whose informatics has already been implemented. All the tools developed during the Thesis are open source and freely available both as executable and source codes on Github.  Any comment or suggestion to the  Thesis as well as to the papers are welcomed. 

The Video of the defense is here.

Michele Bottazzi Ph.D. Thesis

Finally Michele Bottazzi finished his Ph.D. dissertation and he is going towards graduation. The Thesis has some valuable things: an overview on how to estimate evaporation and transpiration which, I think, is easy to read and plane. 

He discusses also the extension of the theory to cover canopies and catchments and provide an implementation of the model called  Prospero. In the final chapter he applies the model to a point case and to a catchment case. In both there are some interesting results to analyze.

You can access the thesis by clicking on the image above.  The slides of his defense are here. Finally below, please find the video of his defense.

Here below the discussion that followed:

If you are interested in understanding a little more about transpiration from a hydrological point of view, this is the right place to start.

Francesco Serafin Ph.D. Defense and Thesis

Francesco Serafin is not anymore a Ph.D. student bu a doctor! His work concerned mainly the structure of the Object Modelling System Version 3 especially in two directions: improving the researchers modelling experience and improving the end users experience. You can learn directly from his video how.

The defense had a more than forty minutes of presentation and the same period of discussion. In order, you can find below, the presentation, the YouTube video of the the defense and the discussion (the latter in Italian).

• The presentation (by clicking on the Figure):

• The Video of the defense

The Discussion (In Italian)

• Last but not least, the Dissertation is here. 

Marialaura Bancheri defense

The Ph.D. Thesis of Marialaura Bancheri is already available in a previous post. On december 14, she finally defended it. This is the video of her performance. Her topics are: research reproducibility, GEOFRAME, reservoir based modelling (or semidistributed modelling) of the hydrological cycle, travel times theory re-interpreted in the perspective of reservoirs modelling.

I have no doubt that it could be very useful to all who are interested in our recent work and to all those that try to interpret catchment scale behavior through travel times. Marialaura was an outstanding student, is an exceptional team manager, and she is looking for an appropriate post-doc position.

Wuletawu's Abera Ph.D. defense

This illustrate the long and detailed work of Wuletawu Abera during his Ph.D. His topic was modelling the whole hydrological cycle, meaning, all the components together with JGrass-NewAGE. 

In order to do this, he had to line up several tools, partition the basins, interpolate meteorological data, to go crazy when the data were not available. Calibrate the submodels, each one by each one with available data; doing educated guesses, when any other option was inexistent. He introduces the use of satellite data in JGrass-NewAGE, and, I think, he did it well.  He never gave up when I bother him. And I think he did a god job. Click on the Figure above to access his presentation. His thesis is available upon request to the Author wuletawu979  <AT > gmail.com.
Wuletawu maintains his own blog where you can find his thoughts and achievements.