Antonio Moreno-Rodenas

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Researcher at Deltares

This work presents a method to emulate the flow dynamics of physically based hydrodynamic simulators under variations of time-dependent rainfall and parametric scenarios. Although surrogate modelling is often employed to deal with the computational burden of this type of simulators, common techniques used for model emulation as polynomial expansion...

Environmental models often contain parameters, which are not measurable, yet conceptual descriptions of some physical process. The value of such parameters is often derived by measuring internal state model variables in the system and indirectly tuning/calibrating the value of the parameters so some degree of match is achieved. Bayesian inference i...

In urban hydrological models, rainfall is the main input and one of the main sources of uncertainty. To reach sufficient spatial coverage and resolution, the integration of several rainfall data sources, including rain gauges and weather radars, is often necessary. The uncertainty associated with rain gauge measurements is dependent on rainfall int...

Vortices are a very common phenomenon to consider in many hydraulic engineering problems, e.g. when designing pump sumps or intake works for turbines. Until now, the focus is on avoiding the development of vortices because of induction of cavitation and air entrainment by a fully developed air core. However, vortices may also be used in a more posi...

Receiving water quality simulation in highly urbanised areas requires the integration of several processes occurring at different space-time scales. These integrated catchment models deliver results with a significant uncertainty level associated. Still, uncertainty analysis is seldom applied in practice and the relative contribution of the individ...

The emergence of increasingly capable Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies is changing the technical landscape in many scientific and technical disciplines, and hydrology is no exception. The numerous applications include surface water supply, groundwater modelling, hydropower generation, agriculture and irrigation, climate change risk and flo...

Dams are essential for flood protection, water resources management, energy generation and storage and food production. However, the consequences of their failure can be catastrophic, as demonstrated by recent examples. Here this study revisits dam failures worldwide since 1900, analysing key factors driving the failure risk, profiling current dam...

Plastic pollution is overflowing in rivers. A limited understanding of the physics of plastic transport in rivers hinders monitoring and the prediction of plastic fate, restricting the implementation of effective mitigation strategies. This study investigates two unexplored aspects of plastic transport dynamics across the near-surface, suspended an...

The accumulation of sediments in stormwater systems negatively affects their functioning. For example, the re-suspension of these sediments can lead to serious pollution of surface water bodies through combined sewer...

Muddy coasts provide ecological habitats, supply food and form a natural coastal defence. Relative sea level rise, changing wave energy and human interventions will increase the pressure on muddy coastal zones. For sustainable coastal management it is key to obtain information on the geomorphology of and historical changes along muddy areas. So far...

Given the urgent need for a high-resolution geomorphological characterization of the coast, we developed an innovative method to classify large amounts of thumbnail images, extracted from publicly available Earth Observation data, into an erosion-dedicated coastal typology. The dataset is an valuable asset for coastal managers who aim for sustainab...

The availability of public satellite imagery, combined with advanced image processing, machine learning and cloud computing, triggered an unprecedented flow of information relevant to the coastal engineering community. From satellite imagery we can nowadays for example derive subtidal bathymetry, beach slopes, beach sediment types and coastline dyn...

Research on the physical, ecological, and environmental processes in the coastal zone traditionally rely on the availability of accurate seafloor topography (bathymetry) information. This information becomes increasingly important as coastal environments are under pressure by climate change and anthropogenic developments. Nonetheless, the bathymetr...

Transitioning urban drainage systems to serve water-smart societies requires the involvement of different disciplines and stakeholders. However, stakeholders have different visions and needs from the transition-ing process (e.g in terms of financing, policy adaptation and system management) these also vary between regions and countries. Identifying...

Spatio-temporal wave patterns due to wave field–structure interaction can be very complex to measure and analyze when using (intrusive) point probes. Free-surface field measurements can offer much needed insight in this domain. Nevertheless, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, these methods are rarely used in experimental offshore engineering an...

Current riverine plastic monitoring best practices mainly consider surface observations, thus neglecting the underlying distribution of plastics in the water column. Bias on plastic budgets estimations hinders advances on modelling and prediction of plastics fate. Here, we experimentally disclose the structure of plastics transport in surface water...

The formation of a layer of floating debris (hardened fat, oil and grease also known as FOG, mixed with plastics, textiles and other materials) is a common problem in many wastewater pumping stations. The uncontrolled build-up of these substances is a main cause of pump malfunction yet removing this material is a labour intensive, risky and expensi...

In recent years, satellite imagery has shown its potential to support the sustainable management of land, water, and natural resources. In particular, it can provide key information about the properties and behavior of sandy beaches and the surrounding vegetation, improving the ecomorphological understanding and modeling of coastal dynamics. Althou...

Accumulation of fat, oil and grease (FOG) in the sumps of wastewater pumping stations is a common failure cause for these facilities. Floating (FOG) solids are often not transported by the pump suction inlets and the individual solids can accumulate to stiff and thick FOG layers. The lack of data about the dynamics in FOG layer formation still hamp...

Water-related problems affect several billion people’s lives and represent an annual challenge assessed at multitrillion US dollars, which substantiates their core role in the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Preventing direct and indirect impacts associated with water excess or water scarcity events requires expert judgement based on reliable inf...

Water quality environmental assessment often requires the joint simulation of several subsystems (e.g. wastewater treatment processes, urban drainage and receiving water bodies). The complexity of these integrated catchment models grows fast, leading to potentially over-parameterised and computationally expensive models. The receiving water body ph...

Under drought stress, Phytoseiulus persimilis females are able to lay drought-resistant eggs through an adaptive maternal effect. The mechanisms making these eggs drought resistant still remain to be investigated. For this purpose, we studied the physiological differences between drought-resistant and drought-sensitive eggs. We compared the volume...

Integrated catchment water quality studies often involve the joint simulation of urban drainage, wastewater treatment operations and physicochemical processes at receiving water bodies. These subsystems present dynamics across multiple space-time scales and contain complex and poorly understood processes. Consequently, such model structures often r...

The description of intertwined ecological processes in surface waters requires a holistic approach that accounts for spatially distributed hydrological/water quality processes. This study describes a new approach to model dissolved oxygen (DO) based on linked hydrodynamic and closed nutrient cycle ecological models. Long term datasets from the Rive...

This paper aims to stimulate discussion based on the experiences derived from the QUICS project (Quantifying Uncertainty in Integrated Catchment Studies). First it briefly discusses the current state of knowledge on uncertainties in sub-models of integrated catchment models and the existing frameworks for analysing uncertainty. Furthermore, it comp...

In this work, an emulator for hydrodynamic simulators is presented, which is capable to take into account rainfall and parametric variations. The emulation scheme can compensate for the non-linear behaviour common in flow propagation solutions.

A methodology is presented which can be used in the evaluation of parametric uncertainty in urban flooding simulation. Due to the fact that such simulations are time consuming, the following methodology is proposed: (a) simplification of the description of the physical process; (b) derivation of a training data set; (c) development of a data-driven...

Integrated Catchment Modelling aims to simulate jointly urban drainage systems, wastewater treatment plant and rivers. The effect of rainfall input uncertainties in the modelling of individual urban drainage systems has been discussed in several studies already. However, this influence changes when simultaneously simulating several urban drainage s...

Slides of the key-notes J.P. Carbajal: Emulation@EmuMore: What is emulation? Gionata Gigghi: Machine learning in geospatial modelling Andreas Scheiddegger: Hierarchical statistical models & tools Antonio Moreno-Rodenas: Practical uncertainty propagation in dissolved oxygen dynamic simulators

This deliverable provides a framework for the application of uncertainty analysis in integrated urban water modelling. Its structure aims to provide a help for modellers by including the different uncertainties into a good modelling approach. Therefore, next to extensive literature for further information, a real world case study, which exemplary s...