Potential MSc Topics at the Chair of Hydrology

Topics on surface water - groundwater modelling in the Wairau Catchment, New Zealand

Topic: Distributed hydrological modelling of the Wairau River catchment using the Raven toolbox. Calibration and uncertainty analysis. Optional: analyse the worth of isotope data to constrain model parameters and uncertainty.

Topic: Sensitivity analysis with the Wairau Plain Surface water groundwater flow model using MF6-ADJ, a "non-intrusive" adjoint sensitivity capability for the MODFLOW 6 groundwater flow process (DOI:  10.1111/gwat.70025).

Topic: Predictive uncertainty analysis of the Wairau Plain Surface water groundwater flow model using modern PEST++ tools and highly complex parameterization techniques.

Topic: Data space inversion (DSI) to calibrate complex groundwater models: Application to the Wairau Plains model.
DSI is a new, computationally efficient method for the calibration of spatially-distributed, 3D surface water - groundwater flow models with long model run-times. The method is implemented in the PEST++ suite and should be applied to the existing MODFLOW model of the Wairau Aquifer, which has been previously calibrated using "classical" PEST tools.

Topic: Diagnosis of model structural errors with time-windowed Bayesian Modell Averaging. Choose from different existing models of case studies: rainfall-runoff, groundwater flow, surface water ground water flow, soil -plant models, .. or BYO. 

Topics on water management under water scarcity

Topic: Optimal control of multi reservoir systems using Multi-Objective Optimal Operations (M3O) Matlab toolbox

Topic: Analysis and simulation of rare drought events on multi reservoir systems 

Requirements:
Experience in programming (Matlab)

Topic: Implementation of a hydrologic benchmark model using the RavenR package

Topic: Implementation of a hydrologic benchmark model using the Delft FEWS Raven software

Topic: Analysis of hydrologic model structures using graph theory

Topic: Structure optimization of the hydrologic model Raven using different global search algorithms(CMA-ES, Cross-Entropy, ABC, …)[group work possible]

Topic: The HydroModel-Challenge: Benchmark of different conceptual hydrologic models [group work possible]

Requirements:
proven experience in programming

Topics on soil water interactions

Topic: Sensitivity of pedotransfer functions on soil water flow using the  Soil Texture Generator

Requirements:
Experience in programming (Matlab)

Topics on flood forecasting using Deep Learning Algorithms

Topic: Anomalie-detection in rainfall runoff data of flood events using machine learning

Topic: Flood forecasting for small catchments using Deep Learning Encoder-Decoder Long Short-Term Memory Networks

Requirements:
Experience in programming (Python/Matlab)

Supervisor:
Prof. Dr. Niels Schütze [E-Mail]