1.

How could the water challenges, reported in your paper, benefit from including
water engineering?
The article given is devoted to the phenomenon of the difference occurring between
effective and topographic areas. The effectiveness of a catchment was derived from
observed water flow, precipitation, and actual evapotranspiration estimates, assuming the
system is closed. However, this assumption is not always eligible, as groundwater from
other catchments can traverse from one catchment diminishing its’ effectiveness to another
catchment increasing its’ effectiveness and vice versa. This study detects and quantifies the
differences between topographic and effective catchment areas using a large sample of
data.
Generally speaking, it was water engineering that made this research possible.
Because every country that had a set of sample data describing the characteristics of its’
catchments has a well-developed network of water measuring points as well. However,
there are lots of countries which data was not present in datasets in this article. There
could be two reasons for that, and the first one is the real absence of measurement stations
(for example very remote places, which are too hard to reach; in third-world countries,
where water engineering is not so developed or in countries where long-term military
operations are conducted).
On the other hand, the reality could be that the country has an enough developed
network of water measurement stations, but they are not connected to the Internet and,
consequently, do not transmit data to the databases. Besides, the information set can be not
full for use in a certain study (e.g. full data set for runoff, but lack of information about the
precipitation due to the placement in mountainous regions). To sum up, the development
of water engineering in these countries could benefit from the deeper study, because of the
larger data amount, which means that the modeling of the processes could be more precise.
Moreover, the crucial meaning for accurate calculations has the spatial resolution of
the data, because working with too coarse resolution could have resulted in unexpected
uncertainty for catchments with the small topographic area due to the averaging over a
large area. The datasets used for the research had the best resolution around 0.25 ◦× 0.25 ◦,
which is approximately 625 km2. The majority of analyzed areas were larger than that
number, however, for the rest 15% of the smaller catchments, the buffer areas were
assigned because the calculation of head difference was impossible due to the spatial
resolution of the available head simulations. This led to the excluding of almost a quarter of
small catchments from calculations. Whereas the development of water engineering, hence,
the network of measuring stations could increase the resolution of the data. Even now it
could be seen in the work of Zhao et al (2006) that there are already some data on actual
evapotranspiration with more fine resolution, but the lack of it is supposed to happen.

2. How do you think digitalization will improve the understanding of hydrological

processes reported in your paper?

The given research provides the first step towards better understanding the
hydrologically effective area of catchments and makes a brief analysis of the connectivity
between neighboring catchments via their topographic boundaries which were needed for
further development of sustainable water engineering. Apparently, some further study is
needed to include geological information into the analysis so that the spatial extent and
subsurface connectivity of the effective catchment can be defined.
Taking that fact into account, the geological survey enforced with digitalization is the
first step for a deeper understanding of the natural processes that take place under our
feet. By enriching the existing knowledge in geology with more data from installed sensors,
one can build up quite accurate models of the distribution of underground formations, the
occurrence of geological bodies, and crustal disturbances. And what is more important,
models of the way they affect the groundwater flow, hence, the difference between
topographical and effective catchment area. As well as to understand, if only groundwater
flow affects that difference or maybe there are more factors (for example, the uncertainties
of precipitation measurement in mountainous regions).
Furthermore, for calculating the ECI, the authors of the paper evaluated
physiographic factors to identify the measure of their influence on the water balance. They
were evaluating some factors that characterize a catchment’s topography, location, climate,
and geology: aridity index, distance to the coast, topographic catchment area, mean slope,
permeability, mean elevation, and the fraction of lakes and reservoirs. For evaluation
authors used the so-called “Random forest algorithm” – a learning method for classification
and regression, which is the first step to weak AI that could be used to solve this type of
problem. In the given research scientists have chosen only seven factors for evaluation, but
the AI could also have tried to take into account more factors, not so obvious to the human
mind.

References:

1. ZHAO, M., RUNNING, S. W. and NEMANI, R. R., 2006, Sensitivity of moderate

resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) terrestrial primary production to
the accuracy of meteorological reanalyzes, Journal of Geophysics Research.
Biogeoscience., 111. G01002