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Category: data systems

How writing an article can come out of the blue (KGE on log-transformed flows: a bad idea?)

How writing an article can come out of the blue (KGE on log-transformed flows: a bad idea?)

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Contributed by Léonard Santos (Irstea, France). It is common to read articles in which the Kling and Gupta Efficiency (KGE, Gupta et al., 2009) or its modified version (KGE’, Kling et al., 2012) are used as a metric to evaluate the quality of streamflow simulations. They are often seen as a solution to substitute the Nash and Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE, Nash and Sutcliffe, 1970). However, are these two criterion totally comparable? Can the KGE be used exactly in the same…

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Flood memory and historical marks of high waters

Flood memory and historical marks of high waters

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Contributed by Maria-Helena Ramos (Irstea, France) Last year, the Hepex Portal published a blog post by Richard Davies from floodlist.com about the UK and Ireland floods in December 2015 and January 2016. When navigating through the floodlist website, I found a page dedicated to flood and high water marks (here). I have always found these marks indicating the level reached by the waters of a river (or any other waterbody) after a flood event to be fascinating. It is not…

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Crowdsourced data for flood hydrology – Interview with flood chasers in France and Argentina

Crowdsourced data for flood hydrology – Interview with flood chasers in France and Argentina

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Contributed by MH Ramos, member of the IRSTEA Columnist Team A recent paper published in the Journal of Hydrology has drawn my attention: Crowdsourced data for flood hydrology: Feedback from recent citizen science projects in Argentina, France and New Zealand. The paper deals with the use of information from social media in applied sciences and operations, with a focus on collecting photos and videos  to better assess river flows and to improve flood mapping after severe events. It prompts reflections on the way qualitative and quantitative data can…

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The quest for better global precipitation data

The quest for better global precipitation data

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Contributed by Hylke Beck, Albert van Dijk, Ad de Roo, Jaap Schellekens, Diego Miralles, Brecht Martens, and Vincenzo Levizzani Information on precipitation is essential for almost any hydrological study. Unfortunately, precipitation is also one of the most difficult to estimate meteorological variables, due its tremendous spatio-temporal heterogeneity, particularly in tropical, mountainous, and snow-dominated regions. Over the past decades, many precipitation datasets have been developed using different techniques and observation sources (see, for instance, International Precipitation Working Group, UCAR Climate Data…

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Forecasting over international borders: limitations and solutions for large-scale or continental forecasting systems

Forecasting over international borders: limitations and solutions for large-scale or continental forecasting systems

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Contributed by Chantal Donnelly (SMHI), member of the SMHI Guest Columnist Team Global and continental forecasting schemes already exist and are used to inform disaster management in countries without sufficient national forecast systems of their own, as inputs to operational oceanographic models and for the general interest of citizens. I have been lucky enough to have worked with two operational European forecasting systems (setting up of E-HYPE and the WET tool, as an operational EFAS forecaster and testing E-HYPE in…

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