The following list presents the accepted special sessions for HIC2024. Submissions for those sessions are encouraged. The special sessions are listed within the topics list of the submission system.
1 - From models to Decision Support Systems
Convenors:
Prof. Philippe Gourbesville - Université Côte d’Azur, France
Dr. Xiaolong Wang - Eccom Network System Co., Ltd, China
About the session:
Over the recent years, the availability of reliable affordable sensors, the improved performances of communications networks, the availability of cloud solutions and the access to massive computational resources have boosted the possibility to integrate forecasts from models running in real-time in Decision Support Systems (DSSs) that were frequently limited to monitoring functions. The growing demand for integration within the DSSs is an opportunity and a challenge for the Hydroinformatic community that should revise computational approach, data handling for real-time operation and integration within environments that are not only focused on water but integrate at least most of the utilities at the city scale. These new challenges will be addressed during the session from concepts to practical implementations through operational examples already deployed in various regions of the world.
2 - Digital twins for watersheds: challenges and advanced Hydroinformatic solutions
Convenors:
Dr. Changjun Liu - China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research (IWHR), China
Prof. Morgan Abily - Université Côte d’Azur, GEOAZUR, France
About the session:
With the development of hydroinformatics technology, the new challenges and opportunities in the field of digital twin watershed has been widely discussed in many water societies and committees. Comparing with the classical approaches applied in watershed management, the add values of new strategies, methods and tools such as the AI and machine learning approach applied for forecasting and early warning, the integrated distributed hydro-simulations applied for virtually representing the hydro-elements in the catchment, and the high performance computation technology applied for supporting the real-time decision-making process, should be all clearly evaluated in the various digital twin watershed applications. This session will mainly focus on advanced and operational hydroinformatics strategies， methods, and solutions of the implementation of digital twin watershed under different conditions.
3 - Water knowledge platforms and applications
Convenor:
Prof. Xuemei Liu – North China University of Water Resources & Electric Power, China
About the session:
The session is dedicated to the development of water knowledge graph approach that integrates various knowledge and information in the field of water into a visual, interactive system that facilitates rapid access and understanding of water knowledge by water practitioners and researchers. The session will cover theory and various application fields as well.
4 - Flash Flood Program: Advanced Hydroinformatic approaches for flash flood defence and prevention
Convenors:
Dr. Ronghua Liu - China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research (IWHR), China
Prof. Philippe Gourbesville - Université Côte d’Azur, France
About the session:
Over recent years, extreme rainfall events have generated flash floods in numerous regions of the world. In many cases, the classical flood defence strategy doesn’t consider the specific aspects of those extreme situations and the consequences remain tragic as risk assessment and prevention are limited. To however come this challenge, new strategies should be defined and implemented with the support of specific hydroinformatic methods and tools. The session will concentrate on prevention strategies and explores how the various hydroinformatic tools can answer to the needs of the field managers. The various presentations will allow to establish a state of the art at the international scale and to identify the needs for new developments.
5 - Urban flooding/waterlogging
Convenors:
Prof. Dedi Liu - Wuhan University, China
About the session:
Due to the climate change and rapid urbanization, urban flooding/waterlogging disasters have become increasingly serious, restricting the sustained development of the economy and society. In order to improve urban flooding/waterlogging disaster prevention and mitigate the impact of flooding/waterlogging disasters, this session will mainly focus on research on urban flooding/waterlogging from disaster mechanism and simulation to risk assessment and resilience improvement of urban flooding/waterlogging.
6 - Extreme Drought and its Impacts in a Changing Environment
Convenors:
Prof. Yi Liu - Hohai University, China
Prof. Yuliang Zhou - College of Civil & Conservancy Engineering, Hefei University of Technology, China
Prof. Zengchao Hao - College of Water Sciences,Beijing Normal University, China
About the session:
Droughts are complex hazardous recurrent and persistent phenomena affecting almost all countries. Under the joint influence of the climate change and increasing human activities, the global hydrological cycle has undergone dramatic changes. Among them, the changes in extreme droughts have a huge impact on human society. Flash droughts and long-term traditional drought events often lead to crop reduction and water crises. In particular, compound events such as compound drought and heat wave events can lead to more devastating impacts than individual extreme events. However, current researches still have some limitations to systematically and comprehensively reveal the evolution characteristics and driving mechanisms of hydroclimatic extreme events in a changing environment, which limits the water resources management and disaster resilience of human society. With the development of science and technology, new theories and methods can provide new ways to explore the changes in the frequency and severity of hydroclimatic extremes for developing mitigation and adaptation strategies. The goal of this session is to improve the understanding of the evolutionary mechanisms and impacts of extreme drought in a changing environment.
7 - New remote sensing methods and new products for hydroinformatics solutions
Convenors:
Dr. Wenlong Song - China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research (IWHR), China
About the session:
In recent years, extreme weather events have occurred frequently worldwide, and flood and drought disasters have become more frequent and stronger. The contradiction between water resource supply and demand has become increasingly acute, and water environment problems have become prominent. The intelligent perception ability of all elements of water conservancy objects and the entire process of governance management is crucial for addressing governance issues related to water disasters, water resources, and water environment. This session will mainly focus on new remote sensing methods and new products to enhance the remote sensing monitoring capabilities for hydroinformatics solutions.
8 - Geospatial Intelligence and Watershed Analysis
Convenors:
Prof. Xiaoxiang Zhang - Hohai University, China, China
About the session:
In recent years, watershed processes modelling and analysis has become a trend in the study of geospatial intelligence and processes. Especially with the frequent occurrence of extreme weather events, basin-scale modelling and analysis with integrated data-model-computing plays an important role in disaster prevention and response. In order to address new challenges and explore new technologies and approaches of watershed geospatial intelligence and process modelling, this session will mainly focus on the techniques, methods and practices of geospatial intelligence and watershed spatiotemporal process modelling for hydroinformatics.
9 - Modelling and machine learning for understanding flash floods and mitigating their impact on Society
Convenors:
Prof. Tang Qiuhong - Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
Prof. Nigel Wright - School of Engineering, University of Birmingham, UK
About the session:
The rapid and destructive inundation from flash floods can cause severe damage to society. Their power is such that they can destroy buildings, uproot trees and move vehicles considerable distances. Not only are they dangerous due to the movement of water, but in many places, they entrain significant amounts of debris and sediment which can increase the damage by several orders of magnitude relative to a flood with just water. The session will especially address the challenges of monitoring of large areas, the model stability, the important role of debris and sediment entrainment, the efficient of early warning systems, the public awareness, the resilience strategies, the urban planning strategy, and consider case studies in several countries.
10 - Climate Change Impacts on Urban Flooding: Challenges and Innovative Solutions
Covenors:
Dr. Ze Jiang, Research Associate, University of New South Wales (UNSW), Email: ze.jiang@unsw.edu.au
Dr. Jiaheng Zhao, Senior Research Scientist, FM Global, Email: jiaheng.zhao@fmglobal.com
Dr. Julien Oliver, Lead Research Scientist, FM Global, Email: julien.oliver@fmglobal.com
Prof. Shie-Yui Liong, Email: yui.liong@h2oclimate.org
About the session:
Urban flooding exacerbated by climate change disrupts lives, damages infrastructure, and challenges the resilience of cities globally. This session explores the growing threats of extreme rainfall, sea level rise, storm surges, and infrastructure capacity exceedance on urban areas. It highlights advanced predictive modeling, technologies, policies, and designs that improve preparedness, emergency response, and long-term adaptation.
Key focus areas include:
• Hydroclimatic Changes: Understanding the shifts in rainfall patterns due to climate change
• Urban Infrastructure Stress Testing: Evaluating the resilience of current urban drainage and flood control systems under various climate scenarios
• Prediction and Forecasting: Exploring advancements in urban flood forecasting, sustainable urban planning, blue green infrastructure, and data-driven approaches to mitigate flooding
• Policy and Governance: Assessing the role of policy frameworks in shaping adaptive urban environments
The session invites input across disciplines to address the growing challenges of climate change impacts on urban flooding while advancing evidence-based solutions suited for cities worldwide
11 - Marine and Coastal Hydroinformatics
Covenors:
Prof. Yanhong WANG, Senior engineer, Nanjing Hydraulic Research Institute (NHRI)
About the session:
Marine and Coastal hydroinformatics involve a wide range of hydraulic issues, such as coastal morphology, wave, tide, current, sedimentation, water pollution, etc. In recent decades, with the increasing coastal development, new challenges such as sea level rise, coastal erosion and related environmental issues have attracted worldwide attention, which calls for a better understanding of coastal processes based on field data collection, analytical methods and modelling techniques. This session will primarily focus on hydraulics in offshore, coastal, and estuarine areas, addressing natural processes, fluid interaction with sediments and structures, environmental impacts, shoreline erosion management, and engineering solutions.
Following topics are welcomed to be discussed in this session:
• Climate change and sea level rise
• Hydrodynamics of offshore structures
• Morphodynamics of salt marshes and tidal flats
• Coastal erosion and management, and engineering solutions
• Storm surges, impacts and solutions
• Coastal and offshore renewable energy development
12 - Data-driven risk management of water-related disasters
Convenors:
Prof. Huimin Wang – Tianjing University, China
Prof. Jing Huang – Hohai University, China
Prof. Qiang Dai – Nanjing Normal University, China
Prof. Dawei Han –University of Bristol, UK
Prof. Gaofeng Liu – Hohai University, China
About the session:
Water-related disasters such as floods and droughts have serious impacts on society. Risk management of water-related disasters require accurate perception of human and disasters processes and their interactions, which depends on various types of data sources. This special session, entitled Data-driven risk management of water-related disasters set out to explore the ever-increasing role of data in all areas of water-related disaster risk and emergency management. The papers presenting examples of multidisciplinary data-driven approaches for development of assessing methods and of mitigation strategies and illustrative case studies will enrich and strengthen the discussion.
13 - High-Performance Computing in Hydrodynamics, Hydrology and Hydroinformatics
Conveners:
High-Performance Computing (HPC) is ever more available and accessible. Although it is extensively used in many fields, hydrodynamics and hydrology still have not widely adopted HPC and have not fully leveraged on the transformative capabilities in addressing key challenges in these fields. HPC resources are available to scientists and practitioners across a range of scales, from single high-end GPUs on workstations to small clusters, and up to national and international HPC centres.
HPC flattens the road leading to very high-resolution hydrodynamic modelling for purposes such as flood modelling and water resources assessment. It allows the scaling up of physically-based models into hydrological scales in space (catchments) and time (years). Enabling high-resolution and large domains allows us to explore the interplay between scales, provide more accurate and integrated forecasts, and remove unnecessary boundaries from our models. Moreover, HPC facilitates augmenting core surface flow and subsurface flow models with additional processes such as sediment transport dynamics, ecohydraulics and ecohydrology, root-soil water interactions, and more complex geophysical flows (mud and debris flows, landslides, avalanches, etc), and exploring complex phenomena across scales such as detailed flood risk assessment and early warning, groundwater scarcity and pollution, hydroclimatic extremes, interactions with climate, and many other hydroinformatics applications with exceptional accuracy and efficiency. HPC will also play a key role in the emergent artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies.
This special session aims to provide an overview of the latest advancements and future directions of HPC-driven research in hydrodynamics, hydrology and hydroinformatics, fostering knowledge and experience exchange between developers, users, researchers, practitioners and policymakers. The session will feature applications using HPC hardware and software, from GPUs to supercomputers. We are interested in contributions that showcase hydro-insights obtained from HPC applications, technical developments towards HPC use, breakthroughs in performance, efficiency, robustness and sustainability of hydroinformatics and HPC, challenges facing the use of HPC in these fields, and technology transfer of HPC applications into practice. Contributions are welcome from all aspects of hydroscience which exploit HPC.
14 - Smart Navigation Structures: Challenges for future inland waterways
Conveners:
Jun Li, Senior engineer, Nanjing Hydraulic Research Institute
About the session:
Inland water transportation is an important part of the national transportation system and the comprehensive utilization of water resources. Navigation structures are important node projects on inland waterways. Safe and efficient operation of navigation structures involves the discipline integration of hydrodynamics, structures, ships, automatic control, hydraulic systems, and others. With the development of new generation of information technologies such as cloud computing, big data and mobile internet, informatization has become the emerging technological means for the long-term high-quality operation, health diagnosis and evaluation of complex navigation facilities. This session will primarily focus on the application of information technology in the planning, design, research, construction and operation management of navigation structures to promote the digital and intelligent development of navigation structures.
Following topics are welcomed to be discussed in this session:
• Plan, Design and Optimization of Navigation Structures
• Building Information Modelling (BIM) of Navigation Structures
• Hydrodynamics of Navigation Structures
• Intelligent Supervision of Navigation Structures
• Prototype Monitoring of Navigation Structures
• Reliability, Maintenance and Resilience of Navigation Structures
15 - River and Lake Protection and Intelligent Management
Conveners:
Dr. Chen XIE, Senior Engineer (Professor level), Nanjing Hydraulic Research Institute
About the session:
Rivers and lakes are important carriers of water resources and components of ecosystems, which are closely related to flood control, water supply and ecological security. Healthy rivers and lakes can meet the sustainable development needs of human society while maintaining their own structural and functional stability. However, with the continuous interference of climate change and human activities, the global health status of rivers and lakes has been affected and damaged to varying degrees, with widespread problems such as deterioration of hydrological conditions, shortage of water resources, water environment pollution, destruction of river and lake morphology and structure, reduction of biodiversity, and degradation of ecosystem functions. To enhance the function of rivers and lakes, restore their health, this session will mainly focus on new technologies and strategies for river and lake protection and intelligent management.
Following topics are welcomed to be discussed in this session:
• Health monitoring and evaluation of rivers and lakes
• Hydroinformatics strategies and tools for the River and Lake Chief System in China
• Nature-based solutions on water quality improvement and ecological recovery
• Technologies and products for rivers and lakes management
• Prevention and control of harmful algal blooms (HABs)
• Modelling, digital twins platform and new hydroinformatics technologies for river and lake management
• Intelligent management, operation and maintenance of rivers and lakes
16 - Hybrid Modeling: Bridging Data-Driven and Mechanistic Approaches for Water Management
Conveners:
This session is organized by the IWA Working Group on Hybrid Modelling in Water and Wastewater Treatment
Chair: Cristian Gomez, Email: cristiancamilo.gomezcortes@ugent.be
Co-Chair: Xu Zou, Email: xzouae@connect.ust.hk
About the session:
In the dynamic landscape of water management, two prevailing modelling approaches—data-driven and mechanistic—have emerged. While each approach brings distinct advantages, they also carry inherent limitations. Recognizing the need for a comprehensive solution, the concept of hybrid modelling has emerged, aiming to synergize the strengths of both methodologies. This session serves as a comprehensive exploration, providing an overview of the current position of hybrid modelling in the modeling landscape, charting the future trajectory, and offering early practical guidelines for the integration of good modeling practices. Throughout the session, we will showcase real-world applications encompassing data-driven, mechanistic, and hybrid modeling. By delving into the distinctive features of each approach and elucidating potential pitfalls, attendees will gain an understanding of when to leverage specific features and conditions to avoid. Join us in this exploration of cutting-edge modeling practices, where we navigate the convergence of methodologies, paving the way for a more robust and adaptable approach to solving complex water sector challenges.
This session is intended to serve as an inspiration for the water community to share and exchange their experiences to create common standards for the future of hydroinformatics.
17 - Eco-environmental hydroinformatics of river and lakes
Conveners:
Qiuwen Chen, Professor, Nanjing Hydraulic Research Institute, qwchen@nhri.cn
Yuqing Lin, Senior engineer, Nanjing Hydraulic Research Institute, yqlin@nhri.cn
Cheng Chen, Senior engineer, Nanjing Hydraulic Research Institute, chencheng@nhri.cn
About the session:
The development of hydroinformatics technology provides great opportunities and challenges for river and lake eco-environment monitoring, modeling and assessment. In recent years, advanced monitoring technology (e.g., eDNA, aqueous fingerprint, isotopic tracer, remote sensing, and so on) and advanced modeling methods (e.g., machine learning, integration of machine learning and physical process model, and so on) have emerged in the field of environmental hydroinformatics. To enhance the application of hydroinformatics technology in the field of river and lake eco- environment management, this session will mainly focus on the application of advanced hydroinformatics techniques to the monitoring, modeling and assessment of river and lake eco-environments.
The subjects covered following topics are welcomed to be discussed in this session:
• Advanced monitoring techniques for rivers/lakes water eco-environment
• Source identification technology of water pollution in rivers/lakes
• Machine learning and physical process models for water quality simulation and forecasting
• Impact assessment of climate change and anthropogenic impacts on rivers/lakes eco-environment
• Rivers and lakes ecosystem assessment methods and models
18 - Hydroinformatics in modelling compound hydroclimatic extremes in a changing climate
Conveners:
Yunqing XUAN
Associate Professor, Fellow of the Royal Metrological Society
Swansea University, UK
About the session:Compound hydroclimatic extremes are typically characterized by the simultaneous occurrence or sequential combination of multiple extreme climate events, which have significant and often amplified impacts on various aspects of the environment and human societies. These events encompass a range of climatic and hydrological phenomena, including heavy rainfall, surges, prolonged droughts, heatwaves, and other exceptional weather conditions. Each of these has been shown to exhibit varying patterns under climate change. Understanding and estimating compound extremes in a changing climate is crucial for assessing the overall risk associated with climate-related events triggered by complex interactions among multiple drivers, which also poses particular challenges. Currently researchers have increasingly focused on integrated modeling approaches that incorporate hydrological, climatological, and environmental factors to capture the complexity of interactions between different components during compound events. Furthermore, statistical analysis and machine learning techniques in hydrology have gained prominence as many researchers tend to explore how these methods can enhance understanding and prediction of compound hydroclimatic extremes through analysis of large datasets and identification of complex patterns. This session will primarily focus on modelling compound hydroclimatic extremes in a changing climate and following topics are welcomed to be discussed:
• Spatiotemporal quantification of compound hydroclimatic extremes
• Advanced statistical and machine learning methods developing for compound extremes
• Risk analysis in compound hydroclimatic extremes
• Decision making and support considering uncertainty and nonstationarity
• AI and machine learning and hybrid modelling of the extremes
19 - Smart Water Management and Technology in the Era of Climate Change
Conveners:
Dongwoo Jang, Associate Professor, Incheon National University, Rep. of Korea
About the session:
As climate change continues to pose unprecedented challenges, our approach to water management must evolve. Extreme weather events, including floods, droughts, and water quality deterioration, underscore the urgent need for innovative solutions.
This session delves into the realm of smart water technology and management, offering a smoother transition towards climate-resilient practices. We'll explore cutting-edge strategies tailored to address the impacts of climate change on water resources. From enhancing water supply and wastewater systems to implementing effective water quality control measures, we'll examine how smart water solutions can mitigate instability and ensure sustainable management practices.
Join us as experts convene to discuss the latest advancements and future pathways in water management, navigating the complexities of climate change with finesse and foresight.