Thursday, April 22, 2021

The Italian National Water Budget on a grid: the BIGBANG project

The BIG BANG project is a valuable project by ISPRA that aims to get the water budget all over Italy on a grid of 1 square kilometer at monthly time scale. Particularly valuable is the operation done to collect the sources of data necessary and, obviously, the operation itself was absolutely necessary in absence of any other Italian (global) initiative. Despite I have some criticism on the methods used, BIG BANG represents certainly a milestone with which all the new works that pretend to be done have to confront


I think it is clear even to the researchers that did it that any single aspect of the work can be improved if compared to the current state of art of hydrology. I dare to say that this budget could be done at daily scale, with better modelling tools, with more organised data and provided as a service to the community on demand. This does not diminishes the effort the Authors did but instead ask for proper financial support, maybe financed by the new PNRR, to provide appropriate open databases of the hydrological and environmental quantities necessary for the analyses, appropriate models, and all it is required, including an open approach in which all the actors (see for instance, Martinengo et al., 2021) can play their role. Personally I think the GEOframe/OMS3 infrastructure could help a lot in this process. I have a conflict of interest in saying it but is is so true that it cannot be left an untold story.  

You can find the report of the project (in Italian) by clicking on the figure. You can also watch the seminar recently held by BIG BANG Authors on YouTube

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