OMS Summer School 2016 - What we actually did

This is what we actually did at the Summer School on OMS3. Here you will find slides and material (actually, it is already presented in the Colorado State University site), but I will document here a little more.  (The material of the Winter School 2019 is quite more informative that this, which is left however for completeness)

Instructors

Wuletawu Abera (University of Trento, Italy)
Olaf David (Colorado State University, Fort Collins, US)
Giuseppe Formetta (Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Wallingford, UK)
Tim Green (Agricultural Research Service, Fort Collins, US)
Greg McMaster (Agricultural Research Service, Fort Collins, US)
Scott Peckham (University of Colorado, Boulder, US)
Riccardo Rigon (University of Trento, Italy)
Francesco Serafin (University of Trento, Italy)
Marialaura Bancheri (University of Trento, Italy) 

Monday -  Introduction, Component-based Modeling Concepts 

09:00 - 12:30 Scope of the class

• Class introduction (Rigon) - I could not be present, so someone talk in my place. 

          I think what I would have to tell you is here.

• Introduction into component-based Modeling(Peckham) Presentation1, Presentation2 

          Other information on Naming things in hydrology is here. However, Scott's                presentation 2 is pretty informative.

• Introduction into OMS (David) Presentation

14:00 - 17:30 Getting Started with OMS(David)

• Software Installation Instructions 
• 'Hello World' Example Example 
• Component Development Presentation

Tuesday -  OMS Introduction

09:00 - 12:30 

• Component Integration (David)  Presentation 
• The Water tank example (Peckham, David) 

        watertank.pdf, watertank.zip, watertank_example.pdf

      The water tank  example is very simple, but very illustrative of what a model is. Today there is a         tendency to think lumped models as a set of tanks with rules for moving water. I will do a post             soon for it.

14:00 - 17:30 OMS Basic Building Blocks (cont.) Step By Step 

• Project structure, components, simulations, file formats, annotations, etc. (Overview, examples.zip )
• Simulation Development. (scripting, testing, component connectivity, Examples) 
• Thornwaite Waterbalance Model example

References: Annotations, DSL, CSV, OMSConsole

Wednesday Modeling Applications I

09:00 - 12:30 Hydrological modelling JGrass-NewAGE (Abera)

         Presentation, LWRB.zip, DMW.zip

14:00 - 17:30 Model calibration algorithms in NewAge-JGrass(Formetta)

        Presentation, prj-adige.zip, prj-snow.zip

References on JGrass-NewAGE can be found here. References on the Horton Machine can be found here. Maybe for most of you is a mystery what Pfafstetter numbering is. You can find information here. If someone has further doubts on components, they are documented on the GEOFRAME blog. If you do not have experience with calibration algorithms, you could start from some recent paper by Hoshin Gupta.

Addedum. Giuseppe added also a presentation of what he did on simulating landslides triggering with GEOtop (by embedding it in OMS3).

Thursday Modeling Applications II 

09:00 - 12:30 Agricultural Ecosystem Services (AgES) Watershed Model (Green)
      Presentation, Ages-Brazil.zip

• Model Description  
• How to run AgES in the OMS Console (Quick Start)
• Brazil case study (streamflow)
• Colorado, USA case study (distributed soil moisture)

AGEs is a "storages" based model, meaning that, as many other modern models, is based on the concept of intercommunicating storages. Physical contents are highly parameterised, but the model works. One of the model characteristic, which is common to other agricultural-oriented hydrological models, is the subdivision in small parcels with multiple communications among them (called Hydrologic Response Units). Interesting also the slides regarding the complexity of models.

14:00 - 17:30 Plant growth modeling with AgES (McMaster)

     Presentation

Starting with Java

Summer School on modelling catchment hydrology with OMS tools

This is to announce a Summer School open up to 25 participants, on modelling catchment hydrology (including recent travel time theories) with products created on the basis of the Object Modelling System v3 (OMS3)  infrastructure.  The School will be held at Trento  university (Italy) from July 18 to July 21 (four days). It is addressed to Ph.D. students, post-docs, young researchers, particularly motivated master students, professionals, who wants to explore a viable, more modern, more flexible and easily expandable alternatives to SWAT and HEC-HMS.

The system is highly innovative for hydrology, since various modeling solutions can be built upon the basic components to fulfill what  research or practice of water management and hazards require. 

In particular during the School, two modelling systems will be used, AGEs by ARS-USDA, and JGrass-newAGE by University of Trento which partially share components and tools for calibrations and other tasks.

More information and details can be seen at the School website: http://webmagazine.unitn.it/evento/dicam/9539/oms-2016

More information on JGrass-NewAGE can be found at: http://abouthydrology.blogspot.it/2015/03/jgrass-newage-essentials.html

More information on AGEs can be found instead at: http://abouthydrology.blogspot.it/2013/01/object-modelling-system-resources.html

Talking about Drones or UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles)

This post collects the slides of the Summer School on the use of UAVs for hydrology monitor, organised by Salvatore Manfreda  (GS) of University of Basilicata. UAVs are getting an increasing attention by hydrologist, and a little literature is growing on the subject.

Here they are the presentations, available on slideshare.

• The introduction to the course

The lectures by:

•  Kelly Caylor (GS): Ecohydrological applications of UAVs
•  Lyndon Estes (GS): What UAV(s) Do That Cheap Satellites (and Fields Scientists) Can't ?
•  Xurxo Gago (GS): Plant water assessment through aerial tomography
• Sabino Bufo (RG): HV-UAV multispectral compared to hyperspectral data collection as applied to vegetation indexes calculation
• Salvatore Manfreda: Surface Hydrology and flood planes
• AIDroni's Luciana de Fino:About the Drones Market

And, last but not least, the exercises of the students

• Novelli, Beerloco, Loiudice, Qeraxhiu
• Albano, De Luca, Luiz Perez, Samela Tauro
• Debas, Faridani, Mayes

Flavia Tauro presentation at the Ph.D. days was on drones too. It was on estimating discharges withUAVs. (Coming soon)

Ning Lu lectures on hillslope processes and (especially) stability, at the Summer School on Landslides

In 2013 University of Calabria organised a very interesting School on Landslide triggering (many thanks to Lino Versace, Giovanna Capparelli and Giuseppe Formetta).  I actually gave a hand to organised it, and  I also gave a lecture on Richards equation.  Waiting for the official post of the lectures at the school site (after which, I will remove my videos), I cannot wait anymore to have on-line the lectures by Ning Lu. He gave four talks taken out of his beautiful book, Hillslope Hydrology and Stability, written with Jonathan Godt, new coordinator of the USGS landslide hazards program, and former co-advisor of my Ph.D. student Silvia Simoni (her thesis here).  A must-watch for any guy in the field !

First talk: A brief conceptual history of soil hydrology and soil mechanics (from Chapter 6 of his book)

Second talk: About Steady infiltration (Chapter 3 of his book)

Third talk, part I: Strength of hillslope materials (Chapter 7 of his book)

Third talk, part II: Hydro-mechanical properties of hillslopes (Chapter 8 of the book)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xokmTXgmTf8

Fourth talk, part I: Failure surfaces  (Chapter 9 the book)

Fourth talk, part II: Field based stability analysis (Chapter 10 of his book)

Richards equation (and hillslope hydrology) video from the Summer School on Landslides

Last summer school on landslides that University of Calabria Organised was pretty successful.  Besides organising it together with Giovanna Capparelli and Giuseppe Formetta, I also gave a lecture on Richards equation (you can find the slides here). Finally, thanks to the organisation, the videos of my lecture are available.

The first part

                                       

The second part

The third part

Hillslope hydrology from the point of view of Richards equation

This is the lecture I gave at the second Summer school on Water Resources that I co-organised. The lecture was recorded in video and should be made available soon, together with the other lectures.
The lecture can be considered an expansion of the talk I gave at Ezio Todini's symposium with more details and, hopefully, more clear explanations. The presentation is, as usual, available on slideshare, and you can get it clicking on the image below.

The presentation mainly use a paper by Cordano and Rigon, 2008 to obtain various degree of simplification of the Richards equation. The scope (especially for what regards the Todini's symposium version) was to show that many approaches currently used derive, in fact, from a simplification of Richards, and there are not very much reasons to shoot to it as unphysical, at least if this is subsequently followed by the use of one of its simplifications.
However, the slides cover also a discussion over the time scales of flows in hillslopes, and the relative timing of vertical and lateral infiltration.

Here it is a short abstract:

The presentation covers Richards equation as applied to Hillslope Hydrology from its foundations. It is said that it assumes mass conservation and  the existence of the Darcy scale at which the soil medium can be treated as a continuum. Then it is specialised using some well known parameterisations (van-Genuchten Mualem), and subsequently is simplified to obtain other equations. In order: the 1-D Richards equation, the Boussinesq equation, the hillslope-storage Boussinesq equation, and finally its stationary approximations.  All of these are used in literature for various purposes, including soil moisture distribution and hillslope stability. The simplifications are based on the assumption that lateral (slope-parallel) flow is slower than slope-normal flow, which is subsequently shown not being necessarily true, true some simulation with a 3-D Richards equation solver. This eventuality is caused by hydraulic conductivity being (in some soils) high variable with water content. Eventually, a conceptual model is built on the knowledge acquired, in order to reduce the computational burden. Lastly some cases are discussed where Richards equation could fail using data from the Panola hillslope. It is shown that the fill-and-spill phenomena can be described properly, and that, on the contrary, the presence of macropores cannot.

The various schemes of simplification have a great effect on the identification of landslides' locations, and, in fact, many of the papers cited (and provided in the blog) are dealing with landslides hazard assessment. 

References cited in the presentation

Beven., K. J., M.J.. Kirkby, A physically based, variable contributing area model of basin hydrology, Hydrological Sciences bulletin-des Sciences Hydrologiques, 24, 1-3, 1979

Buckingham, E. 1907. Studies on the movement of soil moisture. Bulletin 38. USDA Bureau of Soils, Washington, DC.

Casulli, V,  Stelling GS, Semi‐implicit subgrid modelling of three‐dimensional free‐surface flows
International Journal for Numerical Methods in Fluids 67 (4), 441-449

Cordano, E., & Rigon, R. (2007). A perturbative view on the subsurface water pressure response at hillslope scale. Water Resources Research, 1–36.

Cordano, E., & Rigon, R. (2010). A mass-conservative method for the integration of two-dimensional groundwater (Boussinesq) equation. Water Resources Research, 1–24.
Dietrich, W. E., 1989, Slope morphology and erosion processes, in C. Wahrhaftig and D. Sloan (Eds.), Geology of San Francisco and Vicinity, Field Trip Guidebook T105, American Geophysical Union, p. 38-40.

D'Odorico, P., Fagherazzi, S., & Rigon, R. (2005). Potential for landsliding: Dependence on hyetograph characteristics. Journal of Geophysical Research, 110(F1), 1–10. doi:10.1029/2004JF000127

Iverson, R. M., Landslide triggering by rain infiltration, Water Resour. Res., Vol. 36, N0. 7,  1897-1910, 2000

 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

 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

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, 2013

Liu, Z, and Todini, E., Towards a comprehensive physically-based rainfall-runoff model,Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 6(5), 859–881 (2002T)

Montgomery, D. R., and W. E. Dietrich, Where do channels begin?, 1988, Nature, v. 336, p. 232-234.

Mualem, Y., A New Model for predicting the hydraulic conductivity of unsaturated porous media, Water Resour. Res., vol 12, No 3, 1976

Narsilio, G. A., Buzzi, O., Fityus, S., Yun, T. S., & Smith, D. W. (2009). Upscaling Navier-Stokes Equations in porous media: Theoretical, numerical and experimental approach, Computers and Geotechnics, 36(7), 1200–1206. doi:10.1016/j.compgeo.2009.05.006

O'Loughlin, E.M., Prediction of Surface Saturation Zones in Natural Catchments by Topographic analysis, Water resour. Res., vol 22, no 5, 794-804, 1986

Orlandini, S., G. Moretti, M. Franchini, B. Aldighieri, and B. Testa (2003), Path-based methods for the determination of nondispersive drainage directions in grid-based digital elevation models, Water Resour. Res., 39(6), 1144, doi: 10.1029/2002WR001639.

Orlandini, S., P. Tarolli, G. Moretti, and G. Dalla Fontana (2011), On the prediction of channel heads in a complex alpine terrain using gridded elevation data, Water Resour. Res., 47(2), W02538, doi: 10.1029/2010WR009648.

Richards, L.A., Capillary conduction of liquids through porous mediums, Physics 1: 318-333, 1931

Troch P.A., Paniconi, C., van Loon E.E, Hillslope-storage Boussinesq model for subsurface flow and variable source areas along complex hillslopes: 1. Formulation and characteristics response, Water Resour. Res., Vol 39, No 11, 1316, doi:10.1029/2002WR001728, 2003


Tromp-Van Meerveld, H. J., & Mcdonnell, J. J. (2006). Threshold relations in subsurface stormflow: 2. The fill and spill hypothesis. Water Resources Research, 42(2), W02411. doi:10.1029/2004WR003800

M. Th. van Genuchten, A Closed-form equation for predicting the hydraulic conductivity of unsaturated soils, Soil Sc. Soc. of America, vol 44, no. 5, 1980

Whitaker, S., The Forcheimer equation: A theoretical development, Transport in Porous Media, October 1996, Volume 25, Issue 1, pp 27-61

A summer school on landslides modelling (July 4-10 2013)

Shallow landslides are a widespread hazard on which I did a few selected publications. Modelling landslide occurence is problem that is difficult to grasp also because knowledge about the phenomenon covers geology, geotechnics-geo-mechanics , agronomy (especially regarding the role of roots) and, obviously, hydrology. As a result a modern landslide expert has to get accustomed with several point of views which are often divergent, and various modelling approaches and numerics, which makes uneasy a synthesis. Historically the field has crystallised along some concepts and methods which are summarised in one of my previous posts (Guidelines for the mapping of the triggering of landslides and debris flow). To investigate new ideas, mix the competences, and summarise good old tools, University of Calabria and CUDAM (of University of Trento) organised a summer school of which you can find information in the link below the picture.

Lectures of the school were:

Dino Bellugi, Matteo Berti, Giambattista Chirico, Ning Lu, Riccardo Rigon, Cristina Rulli.

The twenty participants came from nine nations and were selected from doctoral students and post-docs.
In the summer school website, it is here, you can find the lectures and the videos of the school.

Summer School on bio-geo-dynamics and Earth Sytem Sciences: The biophysical processes that shape the Earth

This School, the BESS,  has a long tradition that goes back to 1990 and was recently renewed.
I usually suggests to my students that participating is an important experience for their formation. The lecturers are very distinguished colleagues. The location (Venice and the Istituto Veneto) are fantastic. The topics are of general interest and, if not strictly covering hydrology, they are certainly useful to open the view of hydrologists who think that hydrology is a little more that fitting some data set but want to understand "how nature works".

The topics of this year were:

• Spatial and temporal controls of soil function by Bridget Emmet
• The thermodynamics of the Earth System by Axel Kleidon
• Linking pattern formation and spatial ecology by Ehud Meron
• Complex Dynamics of Forest Ecosystems at Different Scales: From 100 square meters to the Global Scale by Herman Shugart

Fortunately all the lectures are now available as streaming videos (not the slides of the lectures unfortunately) and can be viewed here.

Work of students is available instead here. Thanks to Marco Marani and Andrea Rinaldo for organising it, and thanks to the Istituto Veneto di Lettere Scienze ed Arti for making all the material available, and for supporting all of it.