The Hydrological Modelling Class 2021

Index

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Introduction
Software used
The Foreseen Schedule (you are already here)
The lab

Foreseen Schedule (up to Easter)

(boldface dates are those with definitive material, I or directly written in Italian in for Italian, unspecified for English. All slides are in English)

2021-02-22 - Syllabus - Introduction 2 Hydrological Modelling - Illustrating the catchments for the lab.

The real start
Prerequistes
The Topics (from a general point of view) (Vimeo Video 2020)
How you will be graded
Catchments and related issues

2021-02-26 - Discussion of previous lesson topics. Riassunto della lezione in Italiano. (This will be always done, each lesson, but for now on omitted). The rational of introducing these concepts is that catchments are spatially extended and in this course we are interested to deal with catchments hydrology. So this first part is:

Introduction to Geomorphometry I (Storyboard 2020 della lezione, I):

DEMs sources (from Wikipedia). Local and other sources of data:

The basics of DEM analysis (YouTube video 2019,YouTube2020, Sintesi in Italiano 2020)
Hydrogeomorphology: the derived quantities, drainage directions and contributing areas (YouTube video 2019,YouTube2020, Sintesi in Italiano 2020)
On the estimation of tangential stresses in a curved topography (Whiteboard 2020)
References for who wants to go deeper

Peckham, R. J., and G. Jordan. 2007. Digital Terrain Modelling: Development and Applications in a Policy Support Environment. Edited by Robert Joseph Peckham and Gyozo Jordan. New York: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. Lecture Notes In Geoinformation and Cartography.

2021-03-01 - Introduction to Geomorphometry II (Storyboard 2020 in Italiano):

Where do channels begin: Extracting channels and hillslope (YouTubeVideo 2020 b, Sintesi in Italiano 2020)

Old but useful material: extracting the hillslope (YouTube Video 2019,YouTube2020)

Topological classification of catchments elements: Horton-Strahler Ordering (Whiteboard2020); Pfafstetter (Whiteboard2020; an alternative presentation here) and other ordering schemes (Whiteboard 2020 here).

If you want to go a little deeper: Rigon, Riccardo, Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe, Amos Maritan, Achille Giacometti, David G. Tarboton, and Andrea Rinaldo. 1996. “On Hack’s Law.” Water Resources Research 32 (11): 3367–74.

Other interesting quantities: distances to outlet; distance to channels and drainage density, angle of view; shadows.
Catchment description in informatics
Detecting the human landscape (please try to read and summarize the main concepts):

Cao, Wenfang, Giulia Sofia, and Paolo Tarolli. 2020. “Geomorphometric Characterisation of Natural and Anthropogenic Land Covers.” Progress in Earth and Planetary Science 7 (1): 2.

Other references:

Older classes in Italian
Geomorphology with References
Various information from the AboutHydrology Blog
R.Rigon, E. Ghesla, C. Tiso and A. Cozzini, The Horton Machine, pg. viii, 136, ISBN 10:88-8443-147-6, University of Trento, 2006
W. Abera, A. Antonello, S. Franceschi, G. Formetta, R Rigon , "The uDig Spatial Toolbox for hydro-geomorphic analysis" in Geomorphological Techniques, v. 4, n. 1 (2014), p. 1-19

Q&A - Multiple choice questions about Geomorphology

2021-03-05 - This lecture, assumed that now you have at least the concepts of what a catchment is and theoretically you know how to extract it and subdivide it in parts, now you have to deal with the data to drive its hydrology. Because catchments have a spatial distribution, then also the driving data must be distributed. We need therefore methods of interpolation. Hydrological data (Storyboard2020 in Italian)

Which data are we interested and where can we find them ? (This one is a storyboard in English)
Ground data and their interpolation (Zoom2020-I)

Thiessen Polygons (Storyboard2020 in Italian)
Inverse distance Weighting (Storyboard 2020 in Italian)

Introduction to Kriging Theory:

Building the system to solve (Storyboard 2020), the Kriging's equations (YouTube2019 - Slides were a little modified for 2020, YouTube2020, Zoom2020)
Variography (Storyboard 2020, YouTube video 2019, YouTubeVideo2020, YouTube2020b)
Catching the errors of estimates (Storyboard2020 in Italian, Zoom2020)
Flow chart and Various types of Kriging (Storyboard in Italian 2020, Zoom2020)

Additional material:

References:

Marialaura Bancheri, Francesco Serafin, Michele Bottazzi, Wuletawu Abera, Giuseppe Formetta, and Riccardo Rigon, The design, deployment, and testing of kriging models in GEOframe with SIK-0.9.8, Geosci. Model Dev., 11, 2189–2207, 2018 https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-11-2189-2018
Andràs Bardossy, Introduction to Geostatistics, year unknown.
Goovaerts, P. (1997). Geostatistics for Natural Resources Evaluation (pp. 1–488). New York : Oxford University Press.
P.K. Kitanidis, Introduction to GEOstatistics, 1997 https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511626166
Mitas, Lubos, and Helena Mitasova. 1999. “Spatial Interpolation.” Geographical Information Systems: Principles, Techniques, Management and Applications 1 (2). http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.224.5959&rep=rep1&type=pdf.
G. Raspa, Dispense di Geostatistica Applicata, Università di Roma 3, 2010

Q&A - Spatial Interpolation

2021-03-08 - Hydrological Models. This is a class about hydrological models, so what are they ?

What are models in Hydrology (YouTube2020, Zoom2020-I, A summary I, English version here)
Hydrological Dynamical Systems (Zoom2020 - I)
The representation of Hydrological Dynamical System (Zoom2020-I)
Further readings: a blogpost from EGU

2020-03-19 - We do concentrate on such hydrological models that are made up of systems of Ordinary differential equations (ODEs). We give here some examples of HDS (Storyboard2020 in Italiano)

The linear reservoir model (Whiteboard2020, Zoom2020)

Errata Corrige: Linear Reservoir Model

More than one linear reservoir an the Nash model (Whiteboard2020,Zoom2020)
Summing up: We can see the Hydrological Dynamical Systems as systems of reservoirs.
An unexpected candid way (for naive people like me) to model Covid-19 spreading (Whiteboard2020, Zoom2020)

But look how it is a more informed model

2021-03-12 Other more complicated models (Storyboard2020)

The Hymod model (Zoom2020, Discussion2020, Whiteboard's pdf)

Here below we started a little series of lectures about a statistical way of seeing water movements in catchments. This view has a long history but recently had a closure with the work of Rinaldo, Botter and coworkers. Here it is presented an alternative vie to their concepts. Some passages could be of some difficulty but the gain in understanding the processes of fluxes formation at catchment scale is, in my view, of great value and deserves some effort. The way of thinking is the following: a) the overall catchments fluxes are the sum of the movements of many small water volumes (molecules); b) the water of molecules can be seen through 3 distributions: the travel time distribution, the residence time distribution and the response time distributions; c) the relationships between these distributions are revealed; d) the relation of these distributions with the the treatment of the catchments made through ordinary differential equations is obtained through the definition of age ranked distributions; e) The theory this developed is a generalizations of the unit hydrograph theory.

The view of the catchment as the statistics of elementary water volumes moving stochastically
Three points of view for the same quantities (This actually explain the same concepts of the lecture below in a more empirical way)
Residence time, travel time, response time (Whiteboard2020, Whiteboard's pdf). A little of critical discussion is included.

2021-03-15 - Continuing the mechanical-statistical view of the catchments (Storyboard2020)

Response times (a.k.a. life expectations) (Whiteboard2020- Part I, Part II)

Errata corrige. In the last two formulaI did not divided by the precipitation p_{t_{in}}. But this appears corrected in red in the second part.

Summing up:

For the Lab part go here.

Q&A - A student asks and I respond on travel times (in Italian)

2021-03-19 - After digging in the complications of the travel times etc, we go back to Hydrological modelling by reservoirs.

Klicker session on Travel times, Residence Time, etc. (List of questions and answers by students, Zoom2020)
Embedded Reservoirs ModelM (Zoom2020)
Examples of Applications:

2021-03-22 - Flipped Lecture - We need radiation too. The topic is very boring (or technical?) but necessary to who want to do evapotranspiration and snow. After all radiation moves it all.

Radiation (YouTube 2017).

Corripio, J. G. (2002). Modelling the energy balance of high altitude glacierised basins in the Central Andes. Ph.D Dissertation, 1–175.
Corripio, J. G. (2003). Vectorial algebra algorithms for calculating terrain parameters from DEMs and solar radiation modelling in mountainous terrain. Int. J. Geographical Information Science, 17(1), 1–23.
Formetta, G., Rigon, R., Chávez, J. L., & David O. (2013). Modeling shortwave solar radiation using the JGrass-NewAge system. Geoscientific Model Development, 6(4), 915–928. http://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-6-915-2013
Formetta, G., Bancheri, M., David, O., & Rigon, R. (2016). Performance of site-specific parameterizations of longwave radiation. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 20(11), 4641–4654. http://doi.org/10.5194/hess-20-4641-2016
Various material from the AboutHydrology blog

Q&A - Some questions on radiation, your answers and my comments.

2021-03- 26 -

A little about models calibration

Generalities (Zoo2020)

Snow- Doing catchment hydrology in mountain areas without talking about snow modelling is kind of weird, even if many do it. We approach the structure of a few simplified models, after some description of the processing affecting snow metamorphisms

2021-03-29 - Snow modelling equations and models

For who needs some rehearsal: Turbulent transport of vapor (and other quantities): the Dalton and Thermal Energy turbulen law (YouTube2018, YouTube 2019, Zoom2020)

Turbulent Fluxes revisited (Vimeo2020)
The Snow Mass Budget (Vimeo2020)
Before looking at the next slides, maybe you give a look to this following link reminding why mass transport implies energy transport, valid for evaporation as in the general case:

Evaporation as energy transport (Zoom2020)

The Energy Budget for snow (Vimeo2020)
Solving The coupled System (I left the link to the old version but use the link below)

Solving the Energy Budget revisited (Vimeo2020)

Simplified models (Zoom2020)
Snow Measurements

Advanced Material for interested people

Resources:

AboutHydrology/Snow

Seminars

To be scheduled