Benchmark papers in Hydrology

Solicited by the request of a colleague, I started to to think which are the ten papers that most influenced my work as hydrologist. In the meantime I am thinking, I can point out the series that  Jeff McDonnell is editing a series for IAHS,  called Benchmark papers in Hydrology.

Actually, he is providing some of the papers from his website at OSU. Obviuously it would be nice to have, let say, the best historic 100 papers available. Let see what we can do.

GeoPaparazzi is now for free in Android Market

It was announced in the cousin blog about Jgrass. No excuse then to avoid to use it !

This version, the 2.4 had also a Japanese porting by the people of the Disaster Management Information System of the city of Osaka which is visible here .

JGrass-NewAge system first publication

JGrass-NewAGE started as a project for Adige River Basin Authority. The goal was to study, besides the peak flows, droughts, and integrating it with a database, a GIS system, still maintaining the possibility to change parts of the whole system at the necessity. Indeed all the ideas expressed in the  GEOFRAME talk
at 2008 CUAHSI meeting.  The pillar on which we wanted to base that effort was also to have open source, multiplatform, software, possibly developed with open source resources.

We chose to use up-to-date software engineering solutions and therefore we looked for developing software by components.  As explained in another posts we first chose OpenMI and eventually OMS v3 as components framework. We are currently happy with this choice and finally the whole system seems to work incrementally.

The publication on GMD hopefully speaks by itself about what the system does (but many aspects of this enterprise will be explained in other papers). What we hope that this effort can attract the work of other producers of components to enrich the choices that users can do.

The presentation I gave last friday in Montpellier

I was guest of Roger Moussa, and in the committee of the graduation of  Dennis Hallema. My talk summarize my efforts in modeling except the recent Boussinesq equation related work. The title was

The main ideas is that we need different types of models for different scopes, and that this models can be implemented with sound informatics, and without having to redo it again from the scratch. The talk, in a sense, complements the post I made on my future research activities, by specifying the "methods" with which I will envision to do them.  Many live for the motto: getting the right answer for the right reason. I support the idea that for getting the right answer you need sound models. The link under the picture will bring you to the presentation. 

A collection of Classical and Historical Paper on Geophysical Fluid Dynamics

were posted on the web by G.K Vallis of Princeton Exeter University and can be found here.  The collection includes PDFs about

History of Circulation or Dynamics

This section contains papers that give a historical account or interpretation of something, rather than being original research papers in themselves.

Atmospheric Dynamics

This section contains papers on atmospheric dynamic and circulation. The current emphasis is on large-scale phenomena and the general circulation.

Oceanic Dynamics

This section contains papers on oceanic dynamics and circulation. The current emphasis is on meso- and large-scale phenomena and the general circulation.

Geophysical Fluid Dynamics

This section contains papers on dynamics in general, including geophysical fluid dynamics, turbulence theory, instabilities, etc., that is of interest to both oceanographers and atmospheric scientists. It includes papers by Coriolis, Kelvin, Taylor, Ertel, Rossby, Eady, Charney, Phillips, Welander and others.

Climate, Radiation etc

Contains just a very few (at the moment) papers on climate, radiation etc., that are not particularly dynamical. 

It could constitute a nice reading for many.

Marco Borga's talk

Marco concentrated mainly on the interplay between rainfall and the catchment structure, as derived from the data of his Hydrate EU project. Interestingly he introduced (after, he said, initial suggestions from Jim Smith) some spatial moments (i.e. the moments of the spatial distribution of the rainfall with respect to the catchment) to quantify the storm movements during flood events. His results shows that usually storm can be considered almost stationary (on average) over the catchments, but some events are more strongly characterized than other, and especially, concentrating close to the mountain ridge. This cannot be obviously a general result, since around the World the relative position of the relative location of storm to the catchment can be different. What is of general importance is that the space-time evolution of storms can be of some relevance in producing flash floods, and that now we have a statistical tool for quantifying these storms.

 Here it is Marco's abstract on his seminar: Spatial moments of catchment rainfall: rainfall spatial organisation, basin morphology and flood response

 "In this talk I will introduce a general analytical framework for assessing the dependence existing between spatial rainfall organisation, basin morphology and runoff response. The analytical framework builds upon a set of spatial rainfall statistics (termed ‘spatial moments of catchment rainfall’) which describe the spatial rainfall organisation in terms of concentration and dispersion statistics as a function of the distance measured along the flow routing coordinate. The introduction of these statistics permits derivation of a simple relationship for the quantification of storm velocity at the catchment scale. The talk illustrates the development of the analytical framework and explains the conceptual meaning of the statistics by means of application to five extreme flash floods occurred in various European regions in the period 2002-2007. High resolution radar rainfall fields and a distributed hydrologic model are employed to examine how effective are these statistics in describing the degree of spatial rainfall organisation which is important for runoff modelling. This is obtained by quantifying the effects of neglecting the spatial rainfall variability on flood modelling, with a focus on runoff timing. The size of the study catchments ranges between 36 to 982 km2. The analysis reported here shows that the spatial moments of catchment rainfall can be effectively employed to isolate and describe the features of rainfall spatial organization which have significant impact on runoff simulation. These statistics provide essential information on what space–time scales rainfall has to be monitored, given certain catchment and flood characteristics, and what are the effects of space–time aggregation on flood response modeling."

Meeting with Stuart Lane

Stuart was concerned about the connectivity of the river network and to understand how the upstream connectivity affects the downstream hydrology. His message is that restoration or actions taken in a certain position of a river network can easily cause an apparently random result if the information deriving from the netwok connectivity is not accounted for. But, obviously, his arguments have the main focus on the ecology of rivers which is differently affected by the connectivity. Conceptually a step forward.

 Here it is Stuart's abstract on his seminar: Catchment organisation and the flux of water and material 

 "In this seminar I will think about the importance of understanding catchment organization in terms of the functioning of watersheds. Tracer studies have told us, for many years, that catchments organize themselves - the signals that go in to a basin (e.g. rainfall, eroded soil) look very different to those that come out (e.g. river discharge, suspended sediment concentration). But, we have made less progress in understanding the spatial structure that leads to this organization, something that is crucial to prioritizing what to do where in river catchments. I will begin by presenting new ways of modelling this structure, and then show what this might mean: (1) for flood generation; (2) for the effects of land management upon diffuse pollution; and (3) for the watershed organization of salmonid populations. I will conclude by noting that critical to progress in this area is new forms of hydrological conceptualization and the development of innovative experiments to test such ideas."

Stuart's Papers are almost innumerable and can references be found here. At least two are of interest of the discussion we had in Trento:


Lane, S. N., S. M. Reaney, and A. L. Heathwaite (2009), Representation of landscape hydrological connectivity using a topographically driven surface flow index, Water Resour. Res., 45, W08423, doi:10.1029/2008WR007336.

and the invited commentary on Hydrological processes:

Lane, S.N., What makes a fish (hydrologically) happy? A case for inverse modelling, Hydrol. Process. 22, 4493–4495 (2008). DOI: 10.1002/hyp.7145

In the mood of "thinking different" also this paper can bring some interesting information:

Lane, S.N., N. Odoni, C. Landstrom, S J Whatmore, N Ward, and S Bradley (2010) Doing flood risk science differently: an experiment in radical scientific method: doing flood risk science differently, Trans Br. Geogr.