Summary

Fuse (C. Vitolo et al. 2012) is an R package (R Core Team 2016) that implements the framework for hydrological modelling FUSE (Clark et al. 2008) and based on the Fortran code kindly provided by Martyn Clark in 2011. The package consists of two modules: the soil moisture accounting module (fusesma.sim) and the gamma routing module (fuserouting.sim).

The fuse framework takes as input rainfall and potential evapotranspiration time series (areal averages over the river catchment area) and returns a simulated time series of river discharges. It can be used to understand the variability of expected hydrological responses based on model structures.

The package contains default parameter ranges (fusesma.ranges and fuserouting.ranges) and three data objects: fuse_hydrological_timeseries (sample input dataset), parameters (sample parameters) and modlist (list of FUSE model structures).

An early version of this package was used as modelling backend of web applications for the Environmental Virtual Observatory pilot project(C. Vitolo et al. 2015,Wilkinson et al. (2015)).

The fuse package could in future be submitted to CRAN and included in the Task View dedicated to Analysis of Ecological and Environmental Data (Envirometrics). This already includes a number of packages for hydrological modelling such as (Buytaert 2011), (Metcalfe, Beven, and Freer 2016) and (Reusser and Francke 2011). These packages only implement a single model structures,while fuse would complement them providing a framework for ensemble modelling. The package hydromad (Andrews, Croke, and Jakeman 2011) also implements ensemble modelling but it is not currently on CRAN.

A new version of the fuse Fortran code was recently released on GitHub. Fortran users are advised to refer to this latest version of fuse. This package is not an interface for the latest Fortran code but any contribution in this direction is welcome.

References

Andrews, F.T., B.F.W. Croke, and A.J. Jakeman. 2011. “An Open Software Environment for Hydrological Model Assessment and Development.” Environmental Modelling & Software 26 (10): 1171–85. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2011.04.006.

Buytaert, Wouter. 2011. Topmodel: Implementation of the Hydrological Model Topmodel in R. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=topmodel.

Clark, Martyn P., Andrew G. Slater, David E. Rupp, Ross A. Woods, Jasper A. Vrugt, Hoshin V. Gupta, Thorsten Wagener, and Lauren E. Hay. 2008. “Framework for Understanding Structural Errors (Fuse): A Modular Framework to Diagnose Differences Between Hydrological Models.” Water Resour. Res 44 (W00B02). doi:10.1029/2007WR006735.

Metcalfe, Peter, Keith Beven, and Jim Freer. 2016. Dynatopmodel: Implementation of the Dynamic Topmodel Hydrological Model. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=dynatopmodel.

R Core Team. 2016. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. https://www.R-project.org/.

Reusser, Dominik, and Till Francke. 2011. Wasim: Visualisation and Analysis of Output Files of the Hydrological Model Wasim. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=wasim.

Vitolo, Claudia, Yehia Elkhatib, Dominik Reusser, Christopher J.A. Macleod, and Wouter Buytaert. 2015. “Web Technologies for Environmental Big Data.” Environmental Modelling & Software 63: 185–98. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2014.10.007.

Vitolo, Claudia, Peter Wells, Martin Dobias, and Wouter Buytaert. 2012. Fuse: Framework for Understanding Structural Errors, R Package Version 3.1. doi:10.5281/zenodo.61639.

Wilkinson, M.E., E. Mackay, P.F. Quinn, M. Stutter, K.J. Beven, C.J.A. MacLeod, M.G. Macklin, et al. 2015. “A Cloud Based Tool for Knowledge Exchange on Local Scale Flood Risk.” Journal of Environmental Management 161: 38–50. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2015.06.009.