The implementation of the GEOframe system in the Po river district – analysis of water availability and scarcity

In recent years, the frequency of extreme events like floods and droughts, which can cause severe environmental, social, and economic damage, has increased due to climate change and environmental alterations. In response to these challenges, the Po River Basin District Authority (AdBPo) initiated the implementation of the GEOframe modelling system across the entire district in 2021, in collaboration with the GCU-M (Gruppo di Coordinamento Unificato-Magre). The goal was to enhance the existing numerical models for water resource management, providing more accurate quantification and forecasting of spatial and temporal water availability across the Po River Basin, thereby improving overall planning and decision-making processes.

Additionally, a historical analysis of water availability was conducted in Valle d’Aosta and Piemonte, showcasing GEOframe's ability to simulate all key components of the water cycle, including evapotranspiration, water storage, snow accumulation, and water discharge. The implementation of GEOframe in these mountainous regions also underscored the critical role of snow and glaciers in determining water availability, particularly in the context of rising temperatures due to climate change. As a result, future developments of GEOframe will prioritize improving the modelling of these elements to better capture their influence on water resources in a warming climate. The short presentation given at IDRA24 can be obtained by clicking on the above figure.  The poster is available here. . 

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