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

Abstract

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.

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

“…Split-sample tests, i.e., calibrating and evaluating a model on non-overlapping periods (Klemeš, 1986), is key for the assessment of model transferability in time, since in practice models are used outside their calibration conditions. Split-sample tests can be performed for model calibra- tion and evaluation using both CalGR() and SimGR() airGRteaching functions, respectively (see command lines in Appendix Listing D10).…”