airGRteaching: an open-source tool for teaching hydrological modeling with R

Abstract. Hydrological modeling is at the core of most studies related to water, especially for anticipating disasters, managing water resources, and planning adaptation strategies. Consequently, teaching hydrological modeling is an important, but difficult, matter. Teaching hydrological modeling requires appropriate software and teaching material (exercises, projects); however, although many hydrological modeling tools exist today, only a few are adapted to teaching purposes. In this article, we present the airGRteaching package, which is an open-source R package. The hydrological models that can be used in airGRteaching are the GR rainfall-runoff models, i.e., lumped processed-based models, allowing streamflows to be simulated, including the GR4J model. In this package, thanks to a graphical user interface and a limited number of functions, numerous hydrological modeling exercises representing a wide range of hydrological applications are proposed. To ease its use by students and teachers, the package contains several vignettes describing complete projects that can be proposed to investigate various topics such as streamflow reconstruction, hydrological forecasting, and assessment of climate change impact.