Here below we started a little series of lectures about a statistical way of seeing water movements in catchments that, while having a long history (e.g. Niemi, 1977, Rigon et al, 2016) has been largely renewed recently starting from Botter et al., 2010 and Botter et al., 2011. The material is the same prepared for the Hydrological Modelling class however grouped here separately for the readers convenience.  An alternative perspective is presented here regarding their concepts. While certain passages may pose some challenges, the enhanced comprehension of flux formation process ..read more

 4DHydro is a project that came out from a call for tender by  ESA to which we had the pleasure to participate. All the making of the project is, since last week documented on the 4DHydro website that you can find following this link. Not yet available, soon you'll see here a video explaining what the website is supposed to contain.  ..read more

These lecture are actually part of the 2024 course in Hydrological Modelling. However because they can be of some more general interest, I am grouping them also here. They try to review the concepts of modelling in general and when applied to hydrology. In the series of lectures there is also a concise overview of catchment processes. The first lecture image, see below, it a Maurizo Cattelan artwork entitled "A donkey among doctors" which is my attitude when I approach the topic.  Models in Science (Vimeo2024) Catchment processes Hydrological Models Seven steps in hydrological mo ..read more

Stock and flow diagrams (see also here) are  a way to represent dynamical system which is the same area covered by EPN ((Extended Petri Nets). They were brought to my attention by the talk John Baez gave at  Edinburgh Mathematical Society last December. Fortunately the talk is available on Youtube. Although I find that the visuals of EPN are more expressive and the accompanying infrastructure is easier for engineers to comprehend, I have come to realize that listening to the talk is incredibly instructive when it comes to realize that EPN falls in the objects of category t ..read more

The hydrological cycle is significantly influenced by the presence of water in its condensed states in middle and extreme latitudes. Various hydrological parameters change below 0  Celsius, such as water viscosity, thermal capacity, and hydraulic conductivity. Consequently, mainstream hydrology treatments that neglect freezing provide incorrect results in winter, high elevations, and the far north and south for most of the year. In the current state of global warming that threatens the cryosphere which is progressively disappearing, it is even more crucial to address its dynamics.  ..read more

This is a placeholder. Material will follow soon.   ..read more

This is a placeholder. Material coming soon.   ..read more

 Please improve: A nicely comprehensive review of Land-Surface-Models LSM is given in Blyth et al., 2020 being possibly completed by a reading to Fisher, 2020 for a different perspective on processes. The pioneering models were more what we nowadays call Process Based/Mechanistic models which, however contains a lot of parameters and parameterizations that have to ne calibrated, assimilated or characterized. This calibration is essentially a statistical step that in practice transform LSMs in a mix of PDEs, ODEs solver endowed with various techniques derived from statistics or, more recen ..read more

 Gianluca Botter and colleagues (among which a notable mention is needed to Nicola Durighetto) recent work in the ERC project Dynet is remarkable (as well as the older one) and a little of it is in this presentation they kindly prepared for the AboutHydrology blog.The first slides (you find them by clicking on the Figure below) are choreographic (slide 1 only a photo, slide 2 a photographic example of network dynamics). Slide 2 shows that stream intermittency is a pervasive phenomenon in many riverscapes. All river networks, in fact, continuously expand and contract in response to time ..read more

 Invited to talk to remember Fabio Rossi I chose to take a little detour describing the perceptual model of small catchments floods dynamics in the interplay between geology, geomorphology,  and hydrology. Not much technical information though, which you can find in the cited papers, but more the vision of what can be done with physically based models.  The presentation ends with claiming that such approaches that could be seen as overwhelming can instead be pursued in the framework of DARTHs and within a cooperative, participatory action. Enjoy the presentation by v ..read more