AWARE (A tool for monitoring and forecasting Available WAter REsource in mountain environment) has been funded with the contribution of the European Commission - Directorate General for Enterprise and Industry - under the Sixth Framework Programme. The project, started in July 2005, has been concluded in June 2008.
In AWARE the Institute for Electromagnetic Sensing of the Environment (IREA) of CNR co-ordinated a team of hydrologists, remote sensing specialists and information system analysts from 5 European countries with a long term experience in modelling and representing environmental phenomena. The partners are: the Polytechnic of Milan, the Remote Sensing Data Engineering Srl, in Italy; the Swiss Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research, in Switzerland; the Institute for Hydraulics, Hydrology and Water Resources Engineering of Vienna University, in Austria; the Faculty of Civil and Geodetic Engineering of Ljubljana University, in Slovenia; the Cartographic Institute of Catalonia and the Information Systems Department of University "Jaume I", in Spain.
AWARE aimed at providing innovative tools for monitoring and predicting water availability and distribution in those drainage basins where snowmelt is a major component of the annual water balance, such as the Alpine catchments. The Project has been motivated by the urgent need to predict medium-term flows from snowmelt for an effective and sustainable water resources management.
The innovations proposed by the project regard:
o the use of Earth Observation (EO) data, in order to model snow water availability and snow-melt dynamics in a spatially distributed framework exploiting the enhanced capability of such data to provide continuous information on hydro-meteorological state variables;
o the development of an on-line tool to make runoff models accessible on the web sharing them with interested users by offering the possibility to run hydrological models, by means of specifically designed geo-services capable to select, discover and harmonize ground and EO data needed for the purpose.
As far as the assimilation of EO data in snow/water models, the testing models exploited in AWARE are: two models for the evaluation of Snow Water Equivalent (SWE), based on either a statistical or a physical-based approach (fig. 1 and 2, respectively); two models for the quantification of Snowmelt Dynamic, both conceptual and semi-distributed, i.e. the SRM (fig.3) and the modified HBV (fig.4) models. Moreover a model for the analysis of groundwater impact on runoff formation is investigated to study the influence of snowmelt on groundwater dynamics. The calibration, validation and demonstration of models has been performed in Alpine catchments, representative of different geographic conditions in the Alps.
The two runoff models have been implemented in a geo-portal allowing users to access and run geo-services that are capable of coupling on the Web global and local data to compute, archive, upgrade and distribute model results. AWARE developed Catalogue Services, Web Map and Web Feature Services (WMS/WFS), as well as Web Processing Services (WPS) fully compliant with the architecture, standards and recommendations of the INSPIRE (INfrastructure for SPatial InfoRmation in Europe) initiative.
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