Assessment of river flow with significant lateral inflow through reverse routing modeling

The discharge hydrograph estimation in rivers based on reverse routing modeling and using only water level data at two gauged sections is here extended to the most general case of significant lateral flow contribution, without needing to deploy rainfall–runoff procedures. The proposed methodology solves the Saint‐Venant equations in diffusive form also involving the lateral contribution using a “head‐driven” modeling approach where lateral inflow is assumed to be function of the water level at the tributary junction. The procedure allows to assess the discharge hydrograph at ends of a selected river reach with significant lateral inflow, starting from the stage recorded there and without needing rainfall data. Specifically, the MAST 1D hydraulic model is applied to solve the diffusive wave equation using the observed stage hydrograph at the upstream section as upstream boundary condition. The other required data are (a) the observed stage hydrograph at the downstream section, as benchmark for the parameter calibration, and (b) the bathymetry of the river reach, from the upstream section to a short distance after the downstream gauged section. The method is validated with different flood events observed in two river reaches with a significant intermediate basin, where reliable rating curves were available, selected along the Tiber River, in central Italy, and the Alzette River, in Luxembourg. Very good performance indices are found for the computed discharge hydrographs at both the channel ends and along the tributaries. The mean Nash‐Sutcliffe value (NS_q) at the channel ends of two rivers is found equal to 0.99 and 0.86 for the upstream and downstream sites, respectively. The procedure is also validated on a longer stretch of the Tiber River including three tributaries for which appreciable results are obtained in terms of NS_q for the computed discharge hydrographs at both the channel ends for three investigated flood events.     

Algebraic multigrid techniques for discontinuous Galerkin methods with varying polynomial order

We present a parallel algebraic multigrid (AMG) algorithm for the implicit solution of the Darcy problem discretized by the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method that scales optimally for regular and irregular meshes. The main idea centers on recasting the preconditioning problem so that existing AMG solvers for nodal lower order finite elements can be leveraged. This is accomplished by a transformation operator which maps the solution from a Lagrange basis representation to a Legendre basis representation. While this mapping function must be user supplied, we demonstrate how easily it can be constructed for somepopular finite element representations includingquadrilateral/hexahedral and triangular/tetrahedral DG formulations. Furthermore, we show that the mapping does not depend on the Jacobian transformation between reference and physical space and so it can be constructed with very limited mesh information. Parallel performance studies demonstrate the versatility of this approach.     

Using unsteady-state water level data to estimate channel roughness and discharge hydrograph

A novel methodology for simultaneous discharge and channel roughness estimation is developed and applied to data sets available at three experimental sites. The methodology is based on the synchronous measurement of water level data in two river sections far some kilometers from each other, as well as on the use of a diffusive flow routing solver and does not require any direct velocity measurement. The methodology is first analyzed for the simplest case of a channel with a large slope, where the kinematic assumption holds. A sensitivity and a model error analysis are carried out in this hypothesis in order to show the stability of the results with respect to the error in the input parameters in the case of homogeneous roughness and to analyze the effect of unknown roughness heterogeneity on the estimated discharges. The methodology is then extended to the more general case of channels with mild slope and validated using field data previously collected in three Italian rivers: the Arno (in Tuscany), the Tiber (in Latium) and the Vallo di Diana, a small tributary of the Tanagro river (in Southern Italy). The performance of the proposed algorithm has been investigated according to three performance criteria estimating the quality of the match between the measured and the computed stage and discharge hydrographs. Results of the field tests can be considered good, despite the uncertainties of the field data and of the measured values.     

Drafting the LOS Convention

The Drafting Committee of UNCLOS has encountered severe difficulties. Drafting problems derive from the presence in the Draft Convention of different layers of language originating from various sources, such as the Geneva and IMCO Conventions. An entirely new procedure has been adopted by the Drafting Committee to overcome the difficulties. This procedure is based on the work of six ‘language groups’ and their coordinators.     

Evolution models of two flysch basins: The Northern Carpathians and the Southern Apennines

The geological evolution of the external domains of the Northern Carpathians and Southern Apennines is compared and two models of flysch basins are proposed. The first, related to a tensile stage of the orogeny, is applied only to the Northern Carpathian area during the Cretaceous; the latter, related to a compressive stage, is present in both areas during the Cenozoic. The different evolutions of the basins have counterparts in the present-day continental margin and the thinning of the crust during the tensile stage controls the flysch sedimentation in the first model and, during the compressive stage of subduction along mobile plate junctions, enables the accumulation of deposits in trench-like basins to take place.     

MAST solution of advection problems in irrotational flow fields

A new numerical–analytical Eulerian procedure is proposed for the solution of convection-dominated problems in the case of existing scalar potential of the flow field. The methodology is based on the conservation inside each computational elements of the 0th and 1st order effective spatial moments of the advected variable. This leads to a set of small ODE systems solved sequentially, one element after the other over all the computational domain, according to a MArching in Space and Time technique. The proposed procedure shows the following advantages: (1) it guarantees the local and global mass balance; (2) it is unconditionally stable with respect to the Courant number, (3) the solution in each cell needs information only from the upstream cells and does not require wider and wider stencils as in most of the recently proposed higher-order methods; (4) it provides a monotone solution. Several 1D and 2D numerical test have been performed and results have been compared with analytical solutions, as well as with results provided by other recent numerical methods.