A summer school on landslides modelling (July 4-10 2013)

Shallow landslides are a widespread hazard on which I did a few selected publications. Modelling landslide occurence is problem that is difficult to grasp also because knowledge about the phenomenon covers geology, geotechnics-geo-mechanics , agronomy (especially regarding the role of roots) and, obviously, hydrology. As a result a modern landslide expert has to get accustomed with several point of views which are often divergent, and various modelling approaches and numerics, which makes uneasy a synthesis. Historically the field has crystallised along some concepts and methods which are summarised in one of my previous posts (Guidelines for the mapping of the triggering of landslides and debris flow). To investigate new ideas, mix the competences, and summarise good old tools, University of Calabria and CUDAM (of University of Trento) organise a summer school of which you can find information in the flayer below the picture.

Please note that accepted participants will have the lodging paid by the organisation. 

Using ggplot2 for Hydrology

Leonardo Perathoner prepared this for helping my bachelor students:

"Since some student asked to me some information about ggplot, I write it here for everybody.

If you are interested to plots and a graphic quality superior to the standard R, you can utilize the R package ggplot2 !!

Here they are some resources that I want to I would advise to use in your learning process:

1) First a good manual

http://www.bioinformaticslaboratory.nl/twikidata/pub/Education/ComputinginR/ggplot2-book.pdf 

and then, these other sites about ggplot I often use:

2) the official site:

http://docs.ggplot2.org/current/ 

3) a quick cookbook with examples and code snippets

http://www.cookbook-r.com/Graphs/ 

Leonardo "

PS: many other resources here:

http://abouthydrology.blogspot.it/2012/08/r-resources-for-hydrologists.html

A Geomorphological Assessment of Constable Landscapes

I took this post from the River Management Blog, and the post is by Simon Dixon. John Constable is one the greatest English landscape painter, and, in the words of the blog authors, contributed very much to the idea of what a natural landscape is. However, reading the post, you can realize that his paintings portrait not so natural landscapes.

Click, as usual on the painting to jump on the post.

What is the minimal geomorphology-based hydrological model?

This is one of the objects of the research Alban de Lavenne, a Ph.D. student of Christophe Cuddenec pursued here in Trento, during his three months stay the last Fall. Similar approaches can be found in the work by Fenicia, and especially in Fenicia et al., 2008. Fenicia 2008, is a must-read paper, since it is well written, and smart. However there, the  Authors did not use any geomorphic information as guideline in their modeling but just a scheme based on reservoirs, which is, in my view, out-of-date. Which is kind of a pity, considering that we know very much of the morphology of river, even when they are ungauged. Thanks to SRTM, ASTER, and other topographic data, the topology and geometry of river networks, and Earth's elevation is known with unsurpassed precision all over the World, and therefore, the first step to predict what happens in ungauged basins would be to use their geo-morphology, which, in fact, was shown to be important in many papers.

Alban used in his investigation a few simple geomorphological unit hydrograph schemes based on the width function:

• 1F1U1P: 1 velocity applied to entire flow path length
• 1F2U2P: 2 velocities (respectively on hillslope and channelized length) -
• 2F2U3P: 1 velocity for surface flow, 1 velocity for subsurface flow
• 2F3U4P: 2 velocities for surface flow, 1 velocity for subsurface flow

In this context, "velocity" can be read also as "mean travel time" since the relation between the two quantities is given by the appropriate lengths measured along the flow paths.

In any case, the poster you can retrieve below the figure (click on the figure) tells it all. 

Beyond and side by side with numerics

The 23rd of april was quite busy for me. Early in the morning I gave a tak of acouple of hours to the students of Numerical Analysis.  My goal was actually to try to capture their interest about the topics I cover in my research, which I considere complementary to good numerics.

For supporting this idea, I divided my presentation in two parts. The first under the motto: the right numerics, for the right equations. There, I showed how Richards equation can be modified to account for transition to saturated conditions and  for freezing soil. This last part has been largely derived from the work of Matteo Dall'Amico (here his Ph.D. thesis) and the subsequent paper on the Cryosphere journal. With the benefit of hindsight, I can tell that I could have been much more clear on the physics of the problem, but it was just doing the presentation that I realised it.

The second part is dedicated to justify the rational of what I called "The Geoframe project", which is an integrated system for doing hydrology by computer, completely open source, and which has a deployment in the JGrass-NewAGE system. Click on the painting above  to see the presentation. 

Hydrology at Vicenza

Here you can  find the presentation I gave  in Villaverla next April 23th. What I did was collecting many information about the hydrological cycle and its extremes in the Northern Vicentino (Provincia di Vicenza).
I feel proud having been invited to talk in my home town about what I do, and I hope I have not betrayed the expectations. In my presentation. I used pretty much the work of colleagues Andrea Rinaldo, Giulia Passadore, Mario Putti, Marco Borga, Lorenzo Marchi, of the officials of River Authority of "Alto Adriatico" and of others. You can find the presentation by following the link behind the image below (click on the figure).

Hope You enjoy it.

A concise introduction to the uDig GIS

It mainly derives from the uDig site.

The goal of uDig is to provide a complete Java solution for desktop GIS data access, editing, and viewing. 

uDig aims to be:

• User friendly, providing a familiar graphical environment for GIS users;
• Desktop located, running as a thick client, natively on Windows, Mac OS/X and Linux;
• Internet oriented, consuming standard (WMS, WFS, WPS) and de facto (GeoRSS, KML, tiles) geospatial web services; and,
• GIS ready, providing the framework on which complex analytical capabilities can be built, and gradually subsuming those capabilities into the main application

The above explain the name. However it also:

• Works with .shp and companion files for what regards vectorial data (simple features, according to OGC)
• Easy connects with Databases either commercial, or free like Postgresql/Postgis and MySQL
• Interoperates with GRASS commands through the Spatial Toolbox
• Treats  GRASS raster data well as geotiff, jpg,  and the most common raster formats 
• Includes a very powerful map calculator based on jiffle

For what I more or less directly contributed, it embeds in the Spatial Toolbox:

• A very complete suite of tools for doing terrain analysis (pit removal, basin delineation, network extraction, contributing areas calculation etc for more that 50 complex operations) 
• Some hydrological models (like a GIUH model called Peakflow which includes some peculiar features, a distributed model system based on OMS3 components called JGrass-NewAGE, which in turn uses a Kriging component for interpolating rainfall or other quantities (and other interpolators),  a component for the estimation of solar radiation that accounts for shadows and clouds, a rainfall-runoff module, a propagation module, and others components
• Some shallow landslide modelling with SHALSTAB and others simple tools for estimating the extension of debris flow run-out

For what is probably a unique feature, it also gives a GIS interface to (unfortunately, the documentation is still in Italian):

•  EPANET for the verification of water supply systems
• Trento_p, a model based on the GIUH for the design of sewer systems and culverts

Certainly I am forgetting something. Among the prototypes produced, there were:

• An interface to the NASA World Wind Globe
• A treatment of netcdf

These last experiments are not anymore operational but they show the potential of the project which will be exploited when the adequate funding will be raised.

Recently uDig became parts of the Eclipse Foundation Project through the Location Tech initiative. 

Documentation in English can be found here. In Italian instead here.