Judea Pearl Won the Turing Prize

I came to across Judea Pearl book: Causality: models, reasoning and inference in the search for understanding the subtleties of the Bayesian approach to statistics (and statistics in general).  I am  still  studying, and trying hard to understand how his findings can improve my approach to research in Hydrology.   I think that this Turing Prize he got was well deserved, and I did this post  for others to join the list of admirers of his work.

 In his site, videos, tutorial and other good food for thinking, and  "Causal Inference in Statistics: An Overview", Statistics Surveys 3 (2009): 96--146 [Free PDF], a must read for whom interested.^1

^1 For who captured by his work, it could be interesting to give a look to the TETRAD Project.

Modelling catchment-scale shallow landslide occurrence by means of a subsurface flow path connectivity index

This paper extends the concept already introduced in  two previous papers on Hydrological Processes  and Earth Surface Processes and landforms. The idea pursued in the first was that hillslope processes can be conceptualized in order to obtain a topographic index useful for a simple hydrological modelisation of hillslopes. The second paper investigates the role of soil depth and push further the conceptualization, besides introducing some concept of self-organization in the production of instabilities. 

This third paper in row applies the theory above to a case in North of Italy, and tries finally to fill the gap between hillslope modeling and catchment analysis. The paper also introduces the concept of catchment connectivity, which is usually given for granted but it is, indeed, not always present, and build on previou work by Jeff McDonnell and collaborators and Stuart Lane.  Finally the paper investigates the hillslope stability of the basins above.

The model described, CISLAM is available as an OMS component here. 

Michi Lehning: Snow hot and cold, dangerous and beautiful, fragile and persistent

Michi Lehning is one of the leading scientists in  snow and avalanches, and related boundary layer meteorology, research.

He is co-author of  three very good pieces of software:

• Alpine3D
• Snowpack
• MeteoIO

and several papers on the topics he is expert. Recently he worked on the uneven distribution of snow during storms that is very enlightening.  The last March 15, besides being hed of a group at WLSF (here his many projects),  he also became professor at EPFL-ENAC School.
I am writing this to advertise that  his opening lecture at EPFL can be watched and dowloaded here.

Open Topography

The site

http://www.opentopography.org/

hosts free LIDAR data, and tools contained in OpenTopography for their treatment. Data are usually provided in form of points clouds that can be subsequently treated with their tools to obtain DEMs, and in already treated DEMs. They also provide a ciberinfrastructure for the storage and delivery of those data that can be of interest for those who wants to manage professionally a data storage service.
Woth to note is that you can use the jgrasstools for manage them.

Power Laws

Many non linear phenomena where shown to obey a power law. However, this paper shows that we could have inferred them improperly. The paper, I realize, is quite famous, since it gained over than 1000 citations according to Google Scholar (but I did not know it). ...

I gave it a look and it is actually very interesting. In fact, my good all power laws (e.g. Rigon et al.,  1996; Maritan et al., 1996; Rinaldo et al., 1998; Convertino et al., 2007) were a little different, since my exponents were all less than 1 (not greater than 1, as those treated in the paper): but I think that most of the result can be appropriately adapted.  There are also these weblog pages where there are further comments and a lot of information (maybe too much ?) by one of the authors.
For general information about statistics give a look here.

Snow Maps from GEOtop

Arpa Veneto (ARPAV), and Mountaineering s.r.l. a company founded by some of my former students have started an innovative service where our model GEOtop is used together with MeteoIO to produce snow maps.  Precisely maps of snow water equivalent, and snow height, at any the desired time step.  The overall product was named SnowMaps.

ARPAV provides the forcing hydrometeorological data, and  Mountain-eering  performs the simulations and produces the maps. In this first phase of the project maps are given any fifteen days. Only the last maps produced are available on-line, while older data can be requested from the Centro Valanghe di Arabba. Other institutions offer this kind service in the world, however, to our knowledge, if the first time that the product is given on a basis of a physical model.

The maps of snow height cover:

• The whole Veneto
• Comelico-Val d’Ansiei
• Ampezzo
• Cadore
• Agordino-Zoldano
• Alpago 
• Prealpi bellunesi
• Prealpi vicentine
• Prealpi veronesi

and can be found here (click on vai alla mappa for the latest maps).  Reference in Eblish on GEOtop 2.0 used for these maps can be found in another post, or, in Italian, here.

The resolution of the maps is 250 meters.

A Science Initiative of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences

As you may know, the Prediction in Ungauged Basins (PUB) decade of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS)is ending in 2012. After the success of PUB, IAHS is stimulating a public discussion to identify an appealing subject for a new science initiative for the decade 2013-2022.

A Task Force has been nominated to organize and moderate the above discussion, that is taking place in a public blog, at the internet address http://distart119.ing.unibo.it/iahs. The blog already received several visits and comments, and a first summary of the discussion has been recently published.

Alberto Montanari invites everyone to contribute.