Rameau: what is it?

Rameau is a Python package dedicated to watershed flow modeling. Its core is based on the Gardenia and the Eros software that were developed at the French Geological Survey.

Main features

Based on meteorological data (precipitations, potential evapotranspiration), Rameau computes time series of river flows at the outlet of rivers or springs and/or groundwater levels at a specific location in the underlying aquifers. Rameau is a lumped-parameters semi-distributed hydrological models. It can either simulate a single watershed or a cluster of heterogeneous watersheds connected to each other from upstream to downstream.

In each watershed, Rameau simulates the main components of the water cycle through a succession of tanks using simplified physical laws. The effects of pumping in the catchment area can be taken into account. Snow can also be taken into account.

Rameau can be used in the following cases:

• Reconstruction of time series of river flows or groundwater levels over a long period, based on records observed over a shorter period, after prior parameter calibration.
• Probabilistic forecasts of river flows and groundwater levels based on past climatology.

Rameau integrates a constrained optimzation method to calibrate watersheds parameters.

Documentation

Documentation can be found here: https://rameau.readthedocs.io/

Building from sources

Get the source by cloning the repository:

https://gitlab.brgm.fr/brgm/codes-hydrogeologiques/rameau
cd rameau

To install Rameau from sources you need to install the following dependencies :

• meson
• meson-python
• ninja
• pandas
• fypp

pip install meson ninja meson-python pandas fypp

You also needs a c/c++/fortran compiler. The following compilers have proved to work for compiling Rameau:

• GNU Compiler Collection
• MinGW-W64

Once all these tools installed, a simple way to compile Rameau is to used spin. spin is a developer tool to compile scientific Python libraries. It is compatible with python and generate all the targets defined in the meson build files of the project. It can be installed through pip:

pip install spin

Once spin install you can build and run all the tests simply by typing in the source code root folder:

spin build
spin test

Dependencies

The compilation of Rameau rely on the following open source projects:

• toml-f
• nanobind
• datetime-fortran
• fortran stdlib

License

GPL

How to cite Rameau?

To cite a specific version of Rameau, you can use the DOI provided for each official release through Zenodo. Click on the link below to get a specific version and DOI, depending on the Rameau version.

Vergnes, J.-P., & Hallouin, T. (XXXX). Rameau: a software dedicated to the modelling of river flows and/or groundwater levels in watersheds of various scales (vX.X.X). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15095481