June 22 - 25, 2025
Delta Hotel and Conference Centre
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Biography
Riccardo Rigon, along with his co-authors, developed the theory of geomorphologic dispersion, which quantifies the influence of geomorphology on hydrographs. Among his notable contributions, he has suggested that the shape of river networks results from the optimization of energy dissipation and self-organization. Additionally, he has assessed the geometrical and topological organization of these networks, highlighting their fractal structure.
He and his co-authors have also produced a few highly cited papers on permafrost and snow modeling. Furthermore, he has reorganized the theory of transport per travel time at the macroscale.
His theoretical research papers have been instrumental in developing several modeling systems and tools that have modernized hydrological and geomorphological studies. He envisioned and developed geoscientific products such as:
- **GEOtop**: A distributed model/process-based representation of the hydrological cycle with coupled water and energy budgets, modernizing the modeling blueprint established by Freeze and Harlan.
- **JGrass**: An open-source GIS system, now included in the Horton Machine Toolbox, which facilitates various hydrological and geomorphological analyses essential to his research on geomorphology and hydrological modeling.
- **GEOframe-NewAge**: A modeling system that promotes a physico-statistical view of river basin hydrology, incorporating a contemporary treatment of travel times.
- **WHETGEO (Water, Heat, and Transport in GEOframe)**: A rethinking of the algorithms and informatics of GEOtop to improve the modeling and understanding of water and energy fluxes in soils.
- **GEOSPACE (Soil, Plants, Atmosphere Continuum Estimator in GEOframe)**: A process-based modeling infrastructure for investigating soil-plant-atmosphere interactions.
Since 2011, Rigon has maintained a blog aimed at promoting open science and research. He also manages the AboutHydrology mailing list, which serves a community of over six thousand users, facilitating the exchange of information about job positions, schools, conferences, and open-source software.
Rigon is currently a Professor at The Department of Civil, Environmental and Mechanical Engineering and the director of the Center for the Agriculture, Food and Environment at The Università di Trento, Italy.
Abstract
Hydrological cycle in the high-latitude and high-altitude regions is affected by the seasonal freezing and thawing of soil and the presence of permafrost. Permafrost, which is defined as the subsurface material, with a temperature of less or equal to 0 °C for at least two consecutive years. However, these processes are rarely accounted for in mainstream hydrological models, despite their vital effects on the hydrological cycle.
In this study, we summarise some aspects of the thermodynamics of freezing soil, the issues that arise from it, and their tractability in small-scale and large-scale models, including the related scaling issues. Based on the implementation we have made in recent years, here we discuss the problems that arise in numerics from the physics, such as non-linear behaviour of enthalpy (Tubini et al., 2021), and subsequently suggest an algorithm, the Newton–Casulli–Zanolli (NCZ) (Casulli & Zanolli, 2010) to solve them. Additionally, we demonstrated the application of a finite volume implementation of the algorithm called WHETGEO (Tubini and Rigon, 2021). Furthermore, we discuss the findings from this application including the modifications to the hydrological cycle due to freezing soil dynamics and how the algorithm is handling the complexities of these dynamics.