Hydrological Sciences

Hydroinformatics

Sharing is caring: Models for all, presenting eWaterCycle II

EGU Guest blogger March 4, 2020

The photos above were found by doing a google image search for ‘hydrologist’. Apparently our image is that of scientists that get to be outside a lot. We all know that the knowledge we gain from fieldwork gets codified in hydrological models which can be written in all sort of programming languages. “I wonder what this analysis would look like using that other groups hydrological model ...[Read More]

All models are wrong but…

EGU Guest blogger August 28, 2019

Left: Les Grandes Baigneuses by Pierre-August Renoir (1884-1887) [Credit: Philadelphia Museum of Art]. Right: En la playa by Pablo Picasso (1937) [Credit: Guggenheim New York]. Bathers have been the subject of a lot of paintings. Interestingly, over time some of these portraits have become much simpler than their predecessors – though equally effective and successful.

“All models are wrong but some are useful” is a quote you probably have heard if you work in the field of computational hydrology – or ‘hydroinformatics’ – the science (or craft?) of building computer models of hydrological systems. The idea is that, even if these models cannot (by definition!) be a 1:1 representation of reality, their erroneous predictions can still be useful to support decision- ...[Read More]