| Project Title | Short Description | Collaborators | Project Links |
| Using permanent soil moisture stations to seasonally predict hydrology | Continuing: One of my continuing interest is in the technologies underpinning the use of new soil moisture measurement technology (RS, TDR, FDR) for hydrologic prediction. Current activities are in the (1) spatial and temporal persistence of soil moisture patterns and links with soil and vegetation patterns, (2) data assimilation techniques for incorporation of measurements in hydrology models, and (3) the role of soil moisture-ET-rainfall feedbacks in enhancing seasonal climate predictability for continental arid and semi-arid climates. | Jetse Kalma (U. Newcastle) Jeff Walker (U. Melbourne) Randy Koster (NASA) |
SASMAS Tarrawarra |
| SASMAS: Scaling properties of soil moisture | 2001-date: Existing and near future technologies for soil moisture measurements (e.g. remote sensing, TDR) are not at the right resolution, frequency and/or scale to use in hydrologic modelling. PhD student Hemakumara is exploring scaling techniques that can be used to up- and down-scale measurements. | Manju Hemakumara (U. Newcastle) Jeff Walker (U. Melbourne) Jetse Kalma (U. Newcastle) |
SASMAS |
| SASMAS: Data assimilation of soil moisture using stream gauging date | 2001-date: Soil moisture remote sensing cannot be used in heavily vegetated areas because the satellite sensor cannot see through the forest canopy. PhD student Rudiger is exploring the potential use of telemetered streamflow measurments in a soil moisture model to back out distributed soil moisture at the catchment scale in real time. | Chris Rudiger (U. Melbourne) Jeff Walker (U. Melbourne) Jetse Kalma (U. Newcastle) |
SASMAS |
| Spatial organisation of soil depth and other properties | 2003-date: The Heimsath model for soil production has been tested in SIBERIA and shown to give a poor match to generally accepted models of soil depth spatial distribution. Research Fellow Saco extended his model by linking his model to soil moisture. The results that are more qualitatively realistic. We are currently evaluating approaches to collect field data sets of soil depth suitable for quantitatively testing our simulation results. New PhD student Cohen will be exploring other properties of soil organisation such as grading using TERRESIM and extending the previous work of PhD student Sharmeen and research scientist Wells. | Patricia Saco (U. Newcastle) Greg Hancock (U. Newcastle) Sagy Cohen (U. Newcastle) |
Saco Sharmeen Wells |
| Spatial organisation of vegetation in arid regions | 2005-date: Vegetation in arid areas is strongly patterned into bands or clusters of vegetation. Models to date have concentrated on the runoff-runon nature that results in preferential infiltration in vegetation patches. They fail to model key features of the patches. By incorporating erosion feedbacks and hillslope evolution feedbacks on drainage patterns we can better model these features. | Patricia Saco (U. Newcastle) | paper |
| Tracing of cosmogenic nuclides using a landform evolution model | 2004-date: Cosmogenic nuclides have been used for measures of in-situ soil loss and production. PhD student Codilean extends this approach by incorporating the translocation of sediments in an evolving landform. My contribution has been to modify the existing labelled sediment tracking capabilities of SIBERIA to include radionuclide generation and tracking. | Tibi Codilean (U. Glasgow) Trevor Hoey (U. Glasgow) Paul Bishop (U. Glasgow) |
Tibi |
| Event scale landform evolution modelling | 2006: While SIBERIA has always had some event capability there has been a need to provide an easy to use event modelling capability to SIBERIA. The Ranger mine suffered a major cyclone in early 2006. This project uses early version components of TERRESIM to provide an event hydrology model to SIBERIA to model this cyclone and the surrounding wet season. | Ken Evans (eriss) | coming |
| Determining error bands of landform evolution predictions | 2004-date: Using monte-carlo simulation to examine the effect of uncertainties (i.e. model parameters; rainfall, runoff and erosion time series; wildfire and climate change) in landform evolution assessments of waste containment structures. Quantitative probabilities will be provided for identified failure mechanisms. This has involved significant enhancement in the parallel computing capabilities of SIBERIA to make the computations feasible (about 200-300 CPU days of calculations are required). | Ken Evans (eriss) | coming |
| TERRESIM: A next generation environmental modelling system | 2006-date: SIBERIA is dead. Long live TERRESIM. SIBERIA has had a phenomenal lifespan for what was my 1980s PhD code. In recent years its simple architecture has made it increasingly difficult to support, while the demand for its capabilities continues to climb. I will strip out the good bits of SIBERIA, embed them in a more modern (psuedo-object) structure, then address pressing deficiences (grid vs TIN, code forking due to multiple parallel projects extending the code, easy incorporation of new physics, easy linking to independent packages like GIS) while maintaining the advantages (robust, high performance, parallel computing). It is intended that TERRESIM will be open-source once we get over the initial bumps (planned late 2007). TERRESIM will then provide the code base for bigger picture, more general, environmental modelling problems that have escaped the more narrowly focussed SIBERIA. | Steve Lancaster (Oregon State) Mike Kirkby (U. Leeds) Philip Binning (DTU) Paul Bishop (U. Glasgow) |
coming |