Data availability is one of the major constraints in hydrological research, limiting our ability to analyze hydrological processes and their interactions, and to test different model hypotheses. This is in particular true at the catchment scale, where it is frequently difficult to obtain adequate representations of climate and landscape spatial heterogeneity to inform bottom-up modeling approaches, or to design and perform integrated measurements to meaningfully constrain top-down modeling approaches. Notwithstanding this, there are several data sources that even if available are rarely used or poorly exploited in hydrological applications. These include new types of data (e.g. wireless distributed sensors and new remote sensing products), whose potential contribution to processes understanding is still under research, as well as traditional types of data (e.g. results of fieldwork investigations, maps of various characteristics of the landscape), which for reasons such as commensurability problems or inadequate models, are seldom exploited to a full degree in catchment scale studies.
Recent advances in observation techniques, including both field measurements and remote sensing, together with innovative approaches to take advantage of the information content of available data are therefore of interest.
This session will thus focus on how data obtained from new observation techniques and from innovative ways of using and extracting information can be used to inform model design and process knowledge at the catchment scale.
We thus solicit contributions related but not limited to:
(i) Innovative sensing techniques to advance hydrological understanding (e.g. wireless network, fiber optic etc.) and applications
(ii) Methods for the evaluation, visualisation and interpretation of distributed data sets (e.g. soil moisture, micrometeorology, groundwater)
(iii) Analysis of hydrological patterns at different scales and recent ongoing measurements in the experimental river basins throughout Europe (or elsewhere)
(iv) Unusual and unexpected hydrological phenomena identified by measurements that could not be explained by existing theoretical considerations
(v) Gaps in knowledge on integrated basin responses to present and future anthropogenic and/or climate impacts
(vi) Innovative ways of information gain and efficient information extraction for catchment scale models from existing data
(vii) Innovative use and novel combinations of different data sources from existing data to maximize the information gain from catchment scale models