Ecohydrological modeling
ENV-411
Course organizationLectures and project sessions w...
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Description
Course organization
- Lectures and project sessions will be in-presence only.
- Recording of lectures from Prof. A. Porporato (Professor of Ecohydrology at Princeton University, co-author of foundational texts in the field of ecohydrology) can be found at this link. They cover the majority of the course material (plus some add-ons and review material on thermodynamics, probabilistic tools, and his John Dalton Medal lecture at EGU2020).
- Questions and Answers sessions can be done: live during lectures and exercises (highly recommended, so that everyone can benefit from the discussion); through the Moodle Questions and Answers forum; during office hours after contacting the teachers.
Important dates (see detailed course schedule below):
- Form groups for projects by 18 March 2025
- Midterm: 8 April 2025
- Short group presentations: 8 April 2025
- Project presentations: 27 May 2025
- Project report submission: 3 June 2025 (23:59)
- Final exam: 16.06.2025 (09:00-12:00, Room GR C0 01)
Grading
Mid-term exam (15% of final grade)Group project (30% of final grade - based on report and group presentations) Final written exam (55% of final grade)
Intermediate grades are given on a scale of 100 and ultimately weighed and converted to a scale of 6 (Swiss grading system) as: grade_6 = grade_100/100*5 + 1, rounded to 0.25.
Hands-on modeling sessions and Matlab
During the first half of the course there will be several hands-on modeling sessions where the students:
- will learn how to setup and run the T&C ecohydrological model.
- will learn how to build a simplified soil-plant-atmosphere continuum (SPAC) model.
Matlab. The T&C model is written in Matlab and instructions for coding the SPAC model will also be provided in Matlab (although for the latter case, students are free to choose any other programming language). For these sessions, we expect students to already have basic programming knowledge - during the hands-on sessions we will not spend time on learning/revising Matlab basics (for a short intro on Matlab please refer to this link).
- will learn how to setup and run the T&C ecohydrological model.
- will learn how to build a simplified soil-plant-atmosphere continuum (SPAC) model.
Matlab. The T&C model is written in Matlab and instructions for coding the SPAC model will also be provided in Matlab (although for the latter case, students are free to choose any other programming language). For these sessions, we expect students to already have basic programming knowledge - during the hands-on sessions we will not spend time on learning/revising Matlab basics (for a short intro on Matlab please refer to this link).