HydroGeoSphere Research Paper wins Water Resources Research Editors’ Choice Award
Figure 1: The study site with two adjacent headwater catchments in the western Swiss Alps (the Vallon de Nant and the Vallon de La Vare) and associated model mesh (23 layers, ~272,000 nodes).
We’d like to highlight a terrific achievement in the HydroGeoSphere user community, and send a hearty congratulations to Dr. James Thornton and his research team for winning the 2022 Editors’ Choice Award from the Water Resources Research journal.
Dr. Thornton is a Senior Research Scientist of alpine hydrogeology at the Centre for Development and Environment at Universität Bern in Switzerland. Dr. Thornton has collaborated closely with key HydroGeoSphere researchers including Dr. Rene Therrien (Université Laval; the original developer of HydroGeoSphere), Dr. Philip Brunner (University of Neuchâtel), Gregoire Mariethoz (University of Lausanne) & Niklas Linde (University of Lausanne) on a high-impact research paper on the complex hydrology of Alpine headwaters.
Their paper “Simulating Fully-Integrated Hydrological Dynamics in Complex Alpine Headwaters: Potential and Challenges” has been recognized as one of the best papers of 2022 by the editors of Water Resources Research. The prestigious Editors’ Choice Award is awarded to approximately 1% of WRR publications, a testament to it’s significance and extremely high-quality.
This research paper represents presents the first known attempt to automatically calibrate a catchment-scale integrated hydrologic model in a mountainous region using HydroGeoSphere, and makes use of a wide range of advanced HGS features including
CLICK HERE TO READ THE HGS RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT
“HydroGeoSphere was chosen over possible alternatives on account of its support for (partially, in this case) unstructured finite element meshes which – compared with regular discretization schemes – allow better representation of the study area’s complex topography and other physical features than regular discretization schemes. Additionally [...] the stream network is free to evolve “naturally” in HydroGeoSphere.”