Advancing catchment hydrology to deal with predictions under change

Throughout its historical development, hydrology as an earth science, but especially as a problem-centred engineering discipline has largely relied (quite successfully) on the assumption of stationarity. This includes assuming time invariance of boundary conditions such as climate, system configurations such as land use, topography and...

Data compression to define information content of hydrological time series

When inferring models from hydrological data or calibrating hydrological models, we are interested in the information content of those data to quantify how much can potentially be learned from them. In this work we take a perspective from (algorithmic) information theory, (A)IT, to discuss some underlying issues regarding this question. In the...

HydroZIP: How hydrological knowledge can be used to improve compression of hydrological data

From algorithmic information theory, which connects the information content of a data set to the shortest computer program that can produce it, it is known that there are strong analogies between compression, knowledge, inference and prediction. The more we know about a data generating process, the better we can predict and compress the data. A...

Data compression to define information content of hydrological time series

When inferring models from hydrological data or calibrating hydrological models, we might be interested in the information content of those data to quantify how much can potentially be learned from them. In this work we take a perspective from (algorithmic) information theory (AIT) to discuss some underlying issues regarding this question. In...

Using the Wiimote as a sensor in water research

The $40 “Wiimote” (an input device belonging with the Nintendo® Wii™ game system) can be used by hydrologists as a sensor. The device contains three accelerometers and an infrared camera with built?in source tracking. It communicates by Bluetooth®. Because of the efforts of the hacking community it is now easy to let the Wiimote communicate with...

Linking water and energy objectives in lowland areas through the application of model predictive control

Unlike mountainous areas, lowland areas have limited potential to generate energy from water flows. Instead, for water systems in lowland areas that continuously need to pump water out of the system, the focus should be set to saving energy in the present water management. This paper gives an introduction into possibilities to manage water...