Tomorrow, for the "23rd International Day of Light" I am giving a talk about how through the photosynthesis plants take water and carbon dioxide to produce oxygen and carbohydrates (lignin and other stuff). The title was kind of suggested by a book by Oliver Morton of about the same name.
How to face the scale problems in GEOframe. Daniele Andreis is giving his answer by using the capabilities of the GEOframe system. His approach is simple. Taken a catchment subdividing further the HRUs (with an appropriate software component) in smaller HRUs you are able to run a GEOframe modelling solution to the larger catchment (if required) with a specific catchment refined and then you can compare the models parameters of the refined solutions with the coarser one. (That's actually not really done yet ;-)).
"My name is John, and I am an M.Sc. student of water engineering at the Beautiful University of Technology. My M.Sc. thesis subject is a groundbreaking one - 'Application of WRF Regional Model for Rainfall Prediction (Case Study: Northwest of Antarctica).' Under the guidance of Prof. Best Hydrologist, I have delved into the impact of predicted precipitation by the WRF model on flood forecasting in the Hec-Hms (or SWAT) model. My expertise and keen interest in climate change impacts on hydroclimatic extremes, numerical weather prediction, hydrology and water resource management, hydraulic and flood forecasting make me a force to be reckoned with in the field. "
I already wrote on the topic of students inquiring about the possibility to do a Ph.D with me. You can find previous notes here. However, I would still add something.
It's heartening to see that many schools are taking the direction of training students to run WRF, Hec-HMS, SWAT, R, Python and other tools. However, mastering tools is just one aspect of research. To truly investigate nature, one must understand where problems are and be able to modify paradigms and tools to solve them appropriately.
As Richard Feynman said, 'The problem is not people being uneducated. The problem is that people are educated just enough to believe what they have been taught, and not educated enough to question anything from what they have been taught.'
Becoming a solid Ph.D applicant requires making this switch and adding a few phrases to your CV that show that you have understood the Feynman's point. Besides, you should be inquisitive and show some fire inside for discovering new things and achieve results beyond the state-of-art (and for what regards working with me, love computer programming). A PhD is not just a status symbol or a way to gain a good salary - it's a calling for those who are truly passionate about pushing the boundaries of knowledge (see this nice infographics from an old post)
P.S. - I also wrote this "Essential for Hydrologists" that could further help.
Currently, there's a lot of hype surrounding ChatGPT v4. I was curious to explore its capabilities, so I used OpenAccessGPT to bypass current Italian law and access the BOT.
As any year, the first day of Spring and the day before the Water Day, it is announced the Stockholm Water Prize. The Stockholm Water Prize is often described as the Nobel Prize of water and is characterized by a similar selection process. Since 1991, the Stockholm Water Prize has been awarded to people and organizations for extraordinary water-related achievements. Its official site is SIWI. Last year the Prize was given to Wilfried Brutsaert.
This year prize was assigned to Andrea Rinaldo, first Italian to receive it, as a recognition of his achievements and its role for the Italian and International Community of Hydrologist. Professor in Padova and at Ecole Politechnique in Lausanne, he was one of the founder and head of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department of the University of Trento of the degrees in Environmental Engineering. The the official announcement has been shared on SIWI’s Youtube channel on Tuesday 21 March, at 3pm CET. SIWI website (https://siwi.org/stockholm-water-prize/) contains further information.
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| Andrea Rinaldo (center) in Mesiano - Trento - Department of Civil, Environment and Mechanical Engineering Department |
Andrea Rinaldo is one of the most eminent Italian Hydrologists ever. The Italian community of hydrologist bloomed in the last twenty years and is now one of the most active and productive in the World. This was certainly due to the positive action that Andrea Rinaldo started since the late eighties of last century to promote young researchers and put them in contact with some of the most outstanding scientists in the field, starting from Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe, Gedeon Dagan and Peter Eagleson (all of them have received the Stockholm Water Prize), Raphael Bras and others. He was him between the very few who captured the attention of these greats with his creativity and dedication and involved them in researchers with Italians gifting many youngster of an incomparable education in hydrology.
He steered the Italian Water Community to put attention on the important topics of water management, hydrology and geomorphology. Some of the younger Italian scientists could not be aware of that but when some good research is published from Italians, there is a good chance that at least some drops of it have a seed in Rinaldo's academic and scientific work.
Andrea Rinaldo himself is an extraordinary researcher. He gave fundamental contributions in understanding the shape of river networks and his book with Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe is a long-standing milestone on the subject. The theory of optimal channel networks not only gives explanation of how the river networks evolve and behave but also has risen the interest for hydrology of scientists working on related disciplines, and, in particular, of those working on transportation networks making hydrology an epitome of many other physical phenomena.
He contemporarily worked on the theory of the Instantaneous Unit Hydrograph, where his contributions are among the the most cited. More recently he renewed the topic with a couple of papers that completely changed the view on travel times and residence times and related issues. Those contributions are definitive in clarifying the subject and they close with a neat theory ninety years of research history. At the same time those contributions are the seeds of the current studies with tracers and isotopes that are going to push greatly forward our knowledge on water movements in hillslopes and vegetation.
Together with Rodriguez-Iturbe and younger fellows, he was architect of many eco-hydrological studies since the year 2000 that brought new insights in the soil-vegetation-atmosphere interactions and inspired new directions of research.
While continuing to frequent his vast collections of research topics that he manages masterfully, and where there are many “minor’’ contributions that could just be the reward of a carrier for others, he worked intensively in the last twenty years to understand the mechanics of the spreading of the water borne diseases and, in general, of the spreading of populations. In this he actually joined together several of his research favorite topics, river networks, water, transportation issues, complexity, theoretical, field and laboratory work. His recent book with Marino Gatto and Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe is a compendium of provoking ideas and methods that certainly will last long in the libraries (virtual or not) of the researchers of the field.
The lab is almost half of the class. According to the motto "learning by doing" it covers at least three numerical experiments:
When radiation hits canopies its energy is partitioned among the leaves. Dealing with this complexity was faced since the studies by Monsi and Saeki, 1953 and summarised in Goudriaan, 1977 and Hirose, 2004. In the note at the link, there is a brief description of the Sun-Shade model by de Pury and Farquard, 1997 which assume that leaves are divided into 2 compartments, the leaves under sunlit and the leaves in shades. The Authors claim that this simplified model does not imply great errors in estimation of canopy radiation with respect to more complicate and computationally expensive models.
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