the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
airGRteaching: an open-source tool for teaching hydrological modeling with R
Olivier Delaigue
Pierre Brigode
Guillaume Thirel
Laurent Coron
Abstract. Hydrological modelling is at the core of most studies related to water, especially for anticipating disasters, managing water resources, and planning adaptation strategies. Consequently, teaching hydrological modeling is an important, but difficult, matter. Teaching hydrological modeling requires appropriate software and teaching material (exercises, projects); however, although many hydrological modeling tools exist today, only few are adapted to teaching purposes. In this article, we present the airGRteaching package, which is an open-source R package relying on the GR rainfall-runoff models. In this package, thanks to a graphical user interface and a limited number of functions, numerous hydrological modelling exercises representing a wide range of hydrological applications are proposed. To ease its use by students and teachers, the package contains several vignettes describing complete projects that can be proposed to investigate various topics such as streamflow reconstruction, hydrological forecasting, and assessment of climate change impact.
Olivier Delaigue et al.
Status: open (extended)
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RC1: 'Comment on hess-2022-421', Anonymous Referee #1, 02 Mar 2023
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The manuscript presents a contribution to the hydrology teaching task and in general to the water education context, I suppose at the university level. Overall the airGRteaching appears an interesting approach for the purpose: it is a versatile tool able to model streamflow data at different time scale, integrating different hydrological processes, it has a nice and attractive graphical interface and seems to have a good module to interact with the model component and model parameters (par 3.1.1.) in order to explore their relevance in the modlling phase. I found not really detailed the calibration and validation module. I see from figure 9 that it would be possible for the student to graphically realize what is the impact of parameter calibration in terms of relevant hydrological processes (snowmelt effect in figure 9), but other model features would be interesting to be explored in my opinion. As an example it could be instructive and informative for a student to learn and maybe visually catch how an hydrograph would be shaped by a range of value of given parameter (eg. an ensamble of shapes of the recession limbs for an ensamble of catchment delay time) and perhaps have a real time exploration of the assessment of the goodness of fit .
Some minor comments in order to improve the paper preparation:
1)In the abstract (line 5) such as at page 4 line 21, I would suggest the authors to introduce what the GR models (class of models) are, maybe with some basic references. I know that sometime later in the paper a good review of the literature is provided, but I believe some basic reference should be given when introducing the GR models at the very start of the manuscript.
2)The legend and the caption in Figure 2 are not really clear to me. Should be improved.
3)I found not really appropriate the example for "4 years of warm-up" period in figure 8. Probably it was mentioned just as an example, but maight be a bit unrealistic.
4)Also in Figure 12 the legend and the caption should be improved.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-2022-421-RC1 -
AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Olivier Delaigue, 06 Mar 2023
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Please find the reply in the attached file.
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AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Olivier Delaigue, 06 Mar 2023
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CC1: 'short comment', Tam Nguyen, 19 Mar 2023
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The manuscript, titled „airGRteaching: an open-source tool for teaching hydrological modeling with R“ by Delaigue et al. presents an R package with a graphical user interface (GUI) for teaching hydrological modeling. The package was published in the CRAN repository with illustrative examples/data. In general, I found the package easy to use, and the graphical interface helpful to understand the effect of each parameter on the simulated hydrological stores/fluxes. I only have some minor comments, I hope the Editor and authors found it useful.
I think every tool has limitations, there is no perfect tool. As this tool has been used for teaching in various places, I am wondering what the limitations of this tool are (from the students and the lecturer's perspective). In the future, if someone wants to develop a similar tool, which expectations such a tool should be (also from the students and lecturer’s perspectives). I think adding a section describing limitations of this tool and the future outlook for such a tool would be interesting.
When I select „Mountainous“ or „Lowland basins“, there are some error messages (attached figure) appear in the GUI as well as in the Rstudio Console. I would be nice if the authors can fix this.
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AC2: 'Reply on CC1', Olivier Delaigue, 21 Mar 2023
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Please find the reply in the attached file.
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AC2: 'Reply on CC1', Olivier Delaigue, 21 Mar 2023
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RC2: 'Comment on hess-2022-421', Anonymous Referee #2, 24 May 2023
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The manuscript explains the importance of teaching hydrological modeling and the development of an R package capable of teaching and investigating various hydrological parameters. The topic is relevant in hydrology, but the manuscript needs a moderate revision before publishing it to HESS. Please consider my comments below.
- Introduction: The explanation is too less. May be the authors can provide more explanation.
1.1: Needs to be improved.
1.3: Needs to be improved.
1.4: Needs more explanation on the importance of R in the hydrological sector. Currently, what are the model/calibration packages available in the R environment?
1.5: Needs more explanation on why this package is important?
Section 2 is well explained. The website is informative.
Section 3.2.2: What is the optimization function used for calibrating the model? Needs more explanation here.
Overall, it is a good effort to develop this model, and very useful for hydrological teaching. However, it requires more explanation and simple language to get attraction from the model users.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-2022-421-RC2
Olivier Delaigue et al.
Olivier Delaigue et al.
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