There had been at least two substantial phases in development of the Valday Branch of State Hydrological Institute (VB of SHI). The first was to elaborate the concepts, methods and instruments for long-term observation of the water cycle components. Second, the most durable period (1960-80s), was to obtain the data, to find how to treat them correctly and, incidentally, to update those conceptual models employed at that time. Today we may reasonably see a third period when encouraged are applications to environmental monitoring and applied simulation studies. There are constituent perspectives for research and development many of which have been discussed on the Int'l Workshop held in St. Petersburg and Valday on June 1997.

Examine the research comprised three topics resulted from our experimental practice. Their purposes, as it seems, are of great concern for the future of experimental hydrology.

1. Experimental studies and simulation of climate influence on water resources, water balance, river runoff and water availability for crops and forest plant communities.
2. Improvements in flood forecasting methodology based upon long-term observation.
3. Development of probabilistic computations for construction and environmental engineering.

VB of SHI scientific activity is going today into six particular programs. Probably the following themes may be of interest for future international co-operation.

Theme I. Continued are experimental studies in runoff generation from small watersheds with special attention to interrelations between ground water flow and overland flow.

This work has been started about ten years ago targeted to improvements both in measurement technique and in hydrological modeling and computations. Investigations were made in Valday Hills, north-western Russia. Small catchment Usadjevsky Log (about 0,45 km2) composed mainly of two-layered soil (sandy loam on silt) serves as the main study object.

It is gauged of rain recorder, staple snow survey courses, hydrometric weir at outlet, 11 wells for ground water observations in upper Quaternary aquifers, 16 sites for soil moisture measurements by neutron probe. All the observation data are stored in annual reports, and published in a lot of papers on, for instance, soil moisture (Kapotov and Shutov, 1993), snow water contents, evapotranspiration and overland flow (Shutov, 1998a,b,c). Soil samples were taken in the cells 100x100 m each of a regular grid, besides three soil columns were dug out for prevailed soil textural types to study their properties in the laboratory (Shutov and Kaljuzhny, 1994).

Last years the investigations were made using tracer technique (tritium H3 as a natural tracer) for evaluation of the "water age" and for subdivision of total runoff onto the surface and ground water flows. These studies were described as draft (Sokolov et al., 1997), and they, unfortunately, have been interrupted by some economic as well as subjective reasons.

Theme II (in co-operation with the Geophysical Observatory, St. Petersburg). Comparison and inter-validation of satellite-based and land-based data to apply them to description of the LSPs (land surface processes) in climate models.

This is a new task and, we first needed to develop a study program such as below:

1. Soil moisture data analysis (see www:climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/soilmoisture).
2. Development the algorithms for evapotranspiration calculations with reference to:
   1. radiation budget, surface albedo and extinction of solar radiation within a plant canopy;
   2. up-to-date schemes for the surface boundary layer with updating them by our experimental data obtained by an automatic equipment;
   3. non-linearity of the relationship between evaporation and soil moisture;
   4. spatial non-homogeneity in the soil water properties;
3. Improvement of the data treatment to be used in climate models such as:
   1. optimal interpolation and spatial averaging for the soil moisture;
   2. disaggregation of rainfall amounts by radar observation data and allocation of snow water contents by kriging with allowance for elevation.

Theme III. Development of conceptual basis for the information and forecasting system based on weather radar coupled with hydrometric stations in a small river basin.

This project is being continued as the application of radar precipitation data to engineering hydrology. The studies (Shutov, 1999) consist of:

1. Processing of the radar precipitation data by using particular procedures:
   1. digital quantification of the rainfall spatial distributions using specified "runoff-creative" rainfall rates determined by antecedent wetness of the basin;
   2. association of the continued matrices to select the extreme rainfall amounts for specified time intervals that is to be involved into the probabilistic computation of extreme floods;
   3. classification of the matrices by a number of attributes such as mean rainfall rates, standard deviation and the ratios of rain rates at those cells specified as the most representative by their landscapes.
2. Interpretation of these classes of rainfall fields in terms of synoptic and meso-scale processes, estimation of frequency for several types and their transformation.
3. Testing and specifying those stochastic models used in studies of climate which are convenient to be applied to evaluation of water resources in changing climate.

Theme also continues focused on water cycle investigations for the pipeline construction and environmental engineering (Shutov and Kapotov, 1998).

Firstly, for environmental engineering, the data have to be at hand on frequency of the water inflow to drainage area by rainfalls and by snow melting which have been determined from observation for a long time. It has to evaluate the likely inflow rates for the years of various degree of wetness. The water balance approach presumes a detail information on soil physical properties and correctly estimated evapotranspiration from land surface (Shutov, 1998a).

Secondly, the efforts will be made to improve peak flow calculations for those small rivers cross-sected by pipelines. Cluster analysis has been used to choose the representative basins and to delimit the regions (Shutov, 2000) presumed as homogeneous for regional frequency analysis. Again, the statistical approach require for time series of precipitation and runoff.

We would also tender new research themes on Improvement of water-protective agriculture and, on Improvement in management of small reservoirs' watersheds. These might have application of the results achieved for our long-term studies.

On the base of actual and recently obtained information the model must be developed and empirically validated for long-term planning the water protective measures in agriculture based upon the experimental data on water budget components (precipitation, snow water contents, evapotranspiration ground water recharge and overland flow). We suppose that the model will be compatible with the others wide-spread models, which are used in operative forecasting practice.

As the water protective infrastructure, we assume the wells, small farm reservoirs, streams and canals, drainage systems and, soil- and water protective tillage technology. Their development and preservation can be problematic for poor-managed land use during transient state agricultural economy. Economic aspect of land market as well as assignment of land taxes require the quite objective assessment of their expenditures. It needs to investigate previously the physics and environmental status of the problem that would be the aim of this study.

There is a way to determine the surface flow over a hill slope, and to evaluate then in general the intensity of water balance transformation in whole drainage basin and in aquifers. According to study results obtained earlier in watersheds of forest zone the rain induced runoff is predominantly subsurface (Fedorov, 1978). In the last years the experimental data have been obtained (Shutov, 1998c, Sokolov et al., 1997), to testify that watershed and its underground behave otherwise than presupposed by a classical approach. Ground water table is rapidly responsive to infiltration into fractured soil, and some fraction of the water stays partly immovable confined within secluded pores that restrains there most of soluble contaminants. Spatially variable contributing area are simulated based on Green-Ampt approach with empirically defined joint PDF of soil water content and soil hydraulic conductivity (Shutov, 1998c).

Relevant publications

• Fedorov, S.F. 1978. Investigations of water balance components in the forest zone of European part of USSR. - Leningrad: Gidrometeoizdat, 264 pp. (in Russian)
  
• Kapotov, A.A. and V.A. Shutov. 1993. Studies of soil water content on an experimental catchment with use of neutron probe method. - Meteorol. and Hydrol., No. 12, pp. 88-93 (in Russian)
  
• Shutov, V.A. 1996. Calculation of infiltration and runoff with use of the joint probability distribution of the basic soil properties. - Meteorol. and Hydrol., No. 5, pp. 97-103 (in Russian).
  
• Sokolov, B.L., S.V. Marunich, M.L. Markov, and S.V. Zavilejsky. 1997. New results of experimental studies on river runoff formation. - Proc. of the Int. Symp. on runoff computation for water projects, St. Petersburg, 1995, parts I and II. - IHP-V, No 9, UNESCO, Paris, pp. 85-98
  
• Shutov, V.A., 1998a: Experience and problems in development of the experimental research of evapotranspiration. - Meteorol. and Hydrol., No. 1, pp. 82-93 (in Russian).
  
• Shutov, V.A., 1998b: Investigations and modeling of different scale spatial variability of the snow water content. - Bull. of Russian Academy of Science, Geograph. series, No. 1, pp. 122-132 (in Russian).
  
• Shutov, V.A., 1998c: Calculation of the infiltration losses for rainfall induced runoff. - Water Resour., 25, No. 4, pp. 440-447 (in Russian).
  
• Shutov, V.A., 1999: Use of the radar precipitation data for runoff computations. - In: A. Herrmann (Eds.) "Experimental Hydrology with Reference to Processes in Small Research Basins". Proc. of the Int'l Workshop, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2-6 June 1997, pp. 158-167.
  
• Shutov, V.A., 2000: Cluster analysis and numerical taxonomy of river basins. - Meteorol. and Hydrol., No. 1, pp. 90-99 (in Russian).
  
• Shutov, V.A. and I.L. Kaljuzny, 1994: Soil hydro-physical parameters for an experimental small catchment. - Meteorol. and Hydrol., No. 7, pp. 103-109 (in Russian).
  
• Shutov, V.A. and A.A. Kapotov, 1998: Application of regional hydrology for the design of a pipeline route in north Russia. - In: H. Wheater & C. Kirby (Eds.) "Hydrology in a Changing Environment". - John Wiley and Sons, Chichester. Vol. III, pp. 247-252.
  

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