IAHS 90th ANNIVERSARY
Prediction in Ungaged Basins
Prévisions dans les bassins non-jaugés

     

PUB SYMPOSIUM 2012

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Theme 4: New Approaches to Data Collection and Information Gain - Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Convener: Erwin Zehe (erwin.zehe@kit.edu)
Co-conveners: Nick van de Giesen, Vincent Fortin, Theresa Blume, Uwe Ehret, Karsten Schulz (n.c.vandegiesen@tudelft.nl; vincent.fortin@ec.gc.ca; blume@gfz-potsdam.de; uwe.ehret@kit.edu; karsten.schulz@lmu.de)

No prediction without understanding, no understanding without information, no information without data. These statements are valid for any empirical science; the last two statements, however, point to a cardinal problem in hydrological science. In recent years many new approaches to collect data on surface and subsurface properties, states and processes have been developed. This includes geophysical methods (geo radar, active seismic methods, ERT) to collect proxies on subsurface patterns and dynamics; remote sensing methods, cosmic neutrons, scintillometers to collect dynamic proxies on soil moisture, latent and sensible heat fluxes, water stress indices for vegetation; new approaches to assess rainfall variability and variability of air humidity (radar, attenuation of GNSS signals) as well as new smart tracers to discriminate source areas and source volumes of runoff components. While this is a major step ahead we need a much better picture which combination of these data sources and which metrics - to extract information form these data - are needed to
(1) Characterize the hydrological relevant architecture of landscape elements (hillslope, catchments), especially with respect to bedrock topography, subsurface heterogeneity and flow path connectivity; (2) Understand how structural characteristics, and distributed dynamics control integral mass/water and integral energy flows across scales.
These insights are however the key to find out whether certain elements in the landscape exhibit functional similarity with respect to the dominant process (which might of course change depending on the prevailing boundary conditions). This is deemed as a key to better understand spatio-temporal organization of the water cycle at relevant scales and specifically to design more targeted strategies collected the right for the right reasons to maximize information gain when gauging ungauged catchments.

Oral Programme (15 minute talks)

Time Speaker Title
13:00-13:15 Remko Uijlenhoet Calling for rainfall observations: country-wide rainfall maps from cellular telecommunication networks (invited)
13:15-13:30 Solomon Gebreyohannis Forest hydrology in the Blue Nile basin: based on observational analysis and community perception
13:30-13:45 Manika Gupta Evaluation or TRMM rainfall for soil moisture prediction in a sub tropical climate
13:45-14:00 Edwin Sutanudjaja Using ERS spaceborne microwave based soil moisture products to predict groundwater heads in space and time
14:00-14:15 Susan Steele-Dunne Capturing spatial and temporal variability in soil moisture and soil heat flux with Distributed Temperature Sensing (invited)
14:15-14:30 John Selker New Hydrology is in your pocket: cell phones in the clouds (invited)
14:30-14:45
Discussion and Future Directions
14:45-15:00
15:00-15:15
Coffee, Tea & Posters
15:15-15:30
15:30-15:45 Laurent Pfister Spatial patterns of terrestrial diatom communities as indicators of connectivity in the hillslope-riparian-stream system (invited)
15:45-16:00 Kun Yan Investigate the usefulness of SRTM topography to support hydraulic modelling under uncertainty
16:00-16:15 Bettina Schaefli Gauging the contributing catchment area from streamflow (invited)
16:15-16:30 Gianbattista Bussi Calibration of a hydrological model using sediment proxy data
16:30-16:45 Peter Dietrich Opportunities and limitations of near surface geophysical methods for the investigation of ungauged basins (invited)
16:45-17:00 Tobias Schütz On-site visualization and analysis of hydrological processes using handheld thermal imaging (invited)
17:00-17:15
Discussion and Future Directions
17:15-17:30

Poster Programme

Author Title
Theresa Blume In search of hydrologic functional units in the real world: interdisciplinary monitoring design
Annemieke Gardenas The potential impact of climate change on water balances of four catchments within the Blue Nile basin for different scenarios of land-use
Nabi Kolahchi Runoff estimation by regression trees method
Cecile Mallet Rainfall variability measurements using geostationary satellite signals
Makoto Tani A general increasing trend of the annual evapotranspiration in response to the climate warming detected from three small forested catchments in Japan
Ida Westerberg A flow-duration curve strategy for gauging ungauged catchments