Hydrological Modelling and Global Change - Hydrological Modelling

The module is divided into 3 sequences:                                            

(1) Climate variability and change: definitions, principles, greenhouse effect, climate simulations, disaggregation, scenarios and impacts ;                                                                                            

(2) Hydrological modeling: numerical structures and representations, input and control data, state variables, parameter calibration, objective functions and optimization methods, parameter analysis and equifinality, robustness and transferability, sensitivity to climate forcing;                                                

(3) Hydrological modeling tutorials: prepare data, calibrate models, simulate flows, produce graphical output to analyze simulations, simulate the impact of climate change on flows.

The module aims to provide students with the theoretical and practical basis for the implementation of numerical methods in modelling the impact of global changes on water resources, with hydrological models as illustrations: parameter calibration methods, uncertainty and sensitivity analysis methods, data assimilation methods. The targeted skills are the following:

• Methodological knowledge: to acquire an overall vision of the different stages of modeling the hydrological impact of climate change: organization of data, numerical representations, methods of parameter calibration and evaluation of simulations, methods of uncertainty analysis, methods of data assimilation to constrain predictive models.
• Know-how: be able to implement an automatic calibration, an uncertainty and sensitivity analysis of a numerical hydrological model.
• Skills: thinking about "uncertainties" and reasoning about their consequences in modelling, having some hindsight on a hydrological simulation exercise.

Basic numerical programming in R or Matlab.            

General knowledge of hydrology (hydrological cycle, watersheds, precipitation, evapotranspiration, infiltration and runoff, hydrological response)

Final exam with a micro-project report (10 pages) to be completed individually at home (100%).

The module aims to give students the theoretical and practical basis for the implementation of numerical methods in modeling the impact of global changes on water resources, with hydrological models as illustrations. The course will alternate between lectures and tutorials (on Matlab or R) applied to conceptual hydrological models. The lectures will be accompanied by examples to illustrate the interest of these approaches in research and engineering. The tutorials will be conducted on the students' personal computers. The software and data will be provided in advance. A first tutorial will be devoted to the simulation of the impact of Med-CORDEX climate change scenarios on the flows of a Mediterranean basin. A second TD will be devoted to the simulation of flows and snow cover in a mountain basin. The simulations on this basin will be continued during a micro-project to be carried out by the students and to be submitted in the form of a report. This will include a sensitivity analysis to gradually increasing temperatures to assess the potential impact of global warming on snow and flow dynamics.