Thursday, March 30, 2017

Modelling discharge in an Alpine basin with JGrass-NewAGE

This and a related post reports about the Master thesis by Niccolò Tubini and Stefano Tasin. It was a couple years ago that I graduate my last Master guy, and I am happy with these two graduations.
Stefano thesis is in Italian. So I am summarising it a little bit below.
JGrass-NewAGE has a a snow module that was developed by Giuseppe Formetta (GS). Giuseppe developed also a component called  Adige-Hymod for runoff estimation. The two were not tested conjointly (well, they were), and we would like to have a new case to understand more about the behaviour of the model and sharpen the methods we use with it.
 
Stefano did it, making leverage on the NewAGE database of river Adige and using, side by side with NewAGE, GEOtop as the true to reproduce in matter of snow. Other directions could have taken, but Stefano chose this one with excellent results. He had in mind a relatively small basin in the Norther part of Italy that was known to be dominated by snow (and glacier melt) and he wanted to investigate how much of discharge depends upon snow melting. The figure above is one of his results, which shows an excellent discharge fitting and quite impressive demonstration of how snowmelt counts in this case. Thinking that snow on the Alps is going to almost disappear cause the climate change, the basin will go to a quite large change in the discharge regime. It is foreseeable that winter discharge will grow in place of the summer ones, with possible modifications of the discharges distributions.
The thesis and the simulations files used are here.

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