airGRteaching: an open-source tool for teaching hydrological modeling with R

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.