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Prof. Dr. Alberto Viglione

Research Interests

•    Human-water system dynamics
•    Runoff prediction in ungauged basins
•    Space-time variability in flood response
•    Bayesian flood frequency analysis
•    Stochastic rainfall-runoff modelling
•    Mapping rainfall to runoff return periods
•    Hydrological characterisation of river basins
•    Assessment of water resources availability
 

Key Facts

Dr. Alberto Viglione is a Research Fellow at the Vienna University of Technology since 2007. He graduated Magna Cum Laude in 2002 from the Politecnico of Turin in Environmental Engineering with a thesis on "Turbulence structures in the canopy layer''. In years 2003-2004, He received a scholarship on the theme "Physical and hydrological characterisation of river catchments in Piedmont'', financed by Regione Piemonte (Italy). In the period 2004-2007, he carried out his Ph.D. on the theme "Non-supervised statistical methods for the prediction of hydrological variables in ungauged sites'' at the Hydraulic Department of the Politecnico of Turin. In 2009 he received the AMGA price for the best Ph.D. thesis on water resources.

He is one of the Editors of the book "Runoff Prediction in Ungauged Basins - Synthesis across Processes, Places and Scales'' published in 2013 by Cambridge University Press. He has authored or co-authored several papers and book chapters (see Publications). He developed software for regional frequency analysis in the R environment, which is available on-line. He has supervised several Master students and worked as a teaching assistant for several different courses on subjects related to hydrology and water resources management. He acts as associate editor and as a reviewer for several journals in the area of hydrology.
Alberto has organised sessions in conferences such as EGU and AGU. He has been involved in a number of research and consulting projects related to hydrological modelling, and in particular to flood frequency analysis, in Italy, Austria and at the European level.

Research objectives:
- to understand the spatio-temporal dynamics of climatic, hydrologic and human processes in river basins;
- to decipher the implications of these dynamics on the probabilities of extreme hydrological events (in particular river floods) and their evolution in space and time.

Research strategy (combination of):   
- investigation of long time series of observed/reconstructed climatic, hydrologic and human related variables;
- comparative analysis of climatic, hydrologic and human related variables across spatial gradients;
- conceptual modelling of the interconnection of climatic, hydrologic and human processes as a mean to understand what the data say.