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[EN] The entry into force of Directive 2000/60/EC of the European Parliament and the Council of 23 October 2000 established a new model for the management and protection of surface water and groundwater in Europe. In this sense, a thorough knowledge of the basins is an essential step in achieving this European objective. The utility of integrative decision support systems (DSS) for decision-making in complex systems and multiple objectives allows decision-makers to identify characteristics and improve water management in a basin. In this research, hydrological and water management resource models have been combined, with the assistance of the DSS AQUATOOL, with the aim of deepening the consideration of losses by evaporation of reservoirs for a better design of the basin management rules. The case study treated is an Andalusian basin of the Atlantic zone (Spain). At the same time, different management strategies are analysed based on the optimization of the available resources by means of the conjunctive use of surface water and groundwater., The study was performed with the support of the Ecological Transition Ministry, through the Biodiversity Foundation.

The common practices for the planning and management of Water Resources Systems (WSSs) have been challenged in the last few decades by global climate change processes, which are observed around the world in increasing frequencies. Climate change is manifested by climate variability, temperature increase, and extreme events such as droughts and floods, which have a decisive effect on natural resource availability and in turn on water quality. Historical records may not be sufficient to reliably account for uncertain future predictions under climate change conditions. While such highly uncertain situations become the “normal” case worldwide, the traditional practices of probabilistic risk measures cannot be used to appropriately quantify the uncertain phenomena under non-stationarity conditions. To better account for uncertain future conditions, the objective of this study is to develop a water management model based on Info-Gap Decision Theory (IGDT) using optimization under deep uncertainty conditions. The Info-Gap theory is a framework that measures the confidence in the operational decisions by quantifying the robustness to uncertainty without accounting for any probabilistic data. To demonstrate the method as a tool to better guide the long-term sustainable operation of the water supply system under uncertain future conditions, we applied the Info-Gap model to the Sea of Galilee (SoG) regional WSS, which is a significant part of the Israeli National Water System (INWS). For Israel, which is, like other Middle East semi-arid regions, prone to dry conditions and limited water availability, there are well-founded concerns that prolonged periods of drought lie ahead, as a consequence of the global climate change processes. This study contributes a management tool for decision making under deep uncertainty to improve the decision-making process and better adapt to unpredictable uncertain future conditions. We demonstrate how the IGDT could be formulated and used to analyze WSSs under different settings and demonstrate how decisions could be derived from the IGDT formulation. We also show a sensitivity analysis for the obtained solutions.

Advanced modeling and control contribute to the design of efficient and sustainable water management strategies, which are challenged by the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme events often associated with large-scale climate signals, such as El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Despite ENSO-related information provides a great opportunity to make the operations of water systems more flexible and adaptive, incorporating it into an operating policy still represents a major challenge for optimal control algorithms. In this work, we contribute a framework combining Input Variable Selection techniques for ENSO detection with a data-driven control strategy to use this information for improving the system operations. Our framework is demonstrated on the control of the multipurpose Hoa Binh reservoir (Vietnam), showing that ENSO teleconnection represents a valuable information for addressing the performance tradeoffs between energy production, water supply, and flood protection.

Advances in modeling and control have always played an important role in supporting water resources systems planning and management. Changes in climate and society are now introducing additional challenges for controlling these systems, motivating the emergence of complex, integrated simulation models to explore key causal relationships and dependences related to uncontrolled sources of variability. In this brief, we contribute a massively parallel implementation of the evolutionary multiobjective direct policy search method for controlling large-scale water resources systems under uncertainty. The method combines direct policy search with nonlinear approximating networks and a hierarchical parallelization of the Borg multiobjective evolutionary algorithm. This computational framework successfully identifies control policies that address both the presence of multidimensional tradeoffs and severe uncertainties in the system dynamics and policy performance. We demonstrate the approach on a challenging real-world application, represented by the optimal control of a network of four multipurpose water reservoirs in the Red River basin in Northern Vietnam, under observed and synthetically generated hydrologic conditions. Results show that the reliability of the computational framework in finding near-optimal solutions increases with the number of islands in the adopted hierarchical parallelization scheme. This setting reduces the vulnerabilities of the designed solutions to the system’s uncertainty and improves the discovery of robust control policies addressing key system performance tradeoffs.

Hydrol. Sci. J.-J. Sci. Hydrol.ISI Document Delivery No.: EB2CDTimes Cited: 0Cited Reference Count: 153Ceola, Serena Montanari, Alberto Krueger, Tobias Dyer, Fiona Kreibich, Heidi Westerberg, Ida Carr, Gemma Cudennec, Christophe Elshorbagy, Amin Savenije, Hubert Van der Zaag, Pieter Rosbjerg, Dan Aksoy, Hafzullah Viola, Francesco Petrucci, Guido MacLeod, Kit Croke, Barry Ganora, Daniele Hermans, Leon Polo, Maria J. Xu, Zongxue Borga, Marco Helmschrot, Jorg Toth, Elena Ranzi, Roberto Castellarin, Attilio Hurford, Anthony Brilly, Mitija Viglione, Alberto Bloeschl, Guenter Sivapalan, Murugesu Domeneghetti, Alessio Marinelli, Alberto Di Baldassarre, GiulianoPeople Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union [329762]; IRI THESys; German Excellence Initiative; EU [603587]IW acknowledges the support of the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union's 7th Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013/(grant agreement no. 329762). TK is funded, through IRI THESys, by the German Excellence Initiative. SC, AM, AC, and ET acknowledge financial support from the EU funded project SWITCHON (603587).Taylor & francis ltdAbingdon; We explore how to address the challenges of adaptation of water resources systems under changing conditions by supporting flexible, resilient and low-regret solutions, coupled with on-going monitoring and evaluation. This will require improved understanding of the linkages between biophysical and social aspects in order to better anticipate the possible future co-evolution of water systems and society. We also present a call to enhance the dialogue and foster the actions of governments, the international scientific community, research funding agencies and additional stakeholders in order to develop effective solutions to support water resources systems adaptation. Finally, we call the scientific community to a renewed and unified effort to deliver an innovative message to stakeholders. Water science is essential to resolve the water crisis, but the effectiveness of solutions depends, inter alia, on the capability of scientists to deliver a new, coherent and technical vision for the future development of water systems.

[EN] Currently, water accounts are one of the next steps to be implemented in European River Basin Management Plans. Building water accounts is a complex task, mainly due to the lack of common European definitions and procedures. For their development, when data is not systematically measured, simulation models and estimations are necessary. The main idea of this paper is to present a new approach which enables the combined use of hydrological models and water resources models developed with AQUATOOL Decision Support System (DSS) to fill in the physical water supply and use tables and the asset accounts presented in the System of Economic and Environmental Accounts for Water (SEEAW). The case study is the Vélez River Basin, located in the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula in Spain. In addition to obtaining the physical water supply and use tables and the asset accounts in this river basin, we present here the indicators as a result thereof. These indicators cover many critical aspects of water management, showing a general description of the river basin and allowing decision-makers to characterize the pressures on water resources. As a general conclusion, the union of AQUATOOL DSS and SEEAW will provide more complete information to decision-makers and enables to introduce these methodological decisions in order to guarantee consistency and comparability of the results between different river basins., The authors thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments, suggestions and positive feedback. The authors also wish to thank the Water and Environment team of INTECSA-INARSA and the Council of Agriculture, Fisheries and Environment of the Regional Government of Andalusia for the data provided in developing this study and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness for its financial support through the NUTEGES project (CGL2012-34978). We also value the support provided by the European Community's Seventh Framework Program in financing the projects ENHANCE (FP7-ENV-2012, 308438), WAMCD (EC-DG Environment No. 07.0329/2013/671291/SUB/ENV.C.1), LIFE ALBUFERA (LIFE12 ENV/ES/000685), IMPREX (H2020-WATER-2014-2015, 641811) and Research Group RNM-308 of the Andalusian Government.

[EN] Water planning and the Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) represent the best way to help decision makers to identify and choose the most adequate alternatives among other possible ones. The System of Environmental-Economic Accounting for Water (SEEA-W) is displayed as a tool for the building of water balances in a river basin, providing a standard approach to achieve comparability of the results between different territories. The target of this paper is to present the building up of a tool that enables the combined use of hydrological models and water resources models to fill in the SEEA-W tables. At every step of the modelling chain, we are capable to build the asset accounts and the physical water supply and use tables according to SEEA-W approach along with an estimation of the water services costs. The case study is the Jucar River Basin District (RBD), located in the eastern part of the Iberian Peninsula in Spain which as in other many Mediterranean basins is currently water-stressed. To guide this work we have used PATRICAL model in combination with AQUATOOL Decision Support System (DSS). The results indicate that for the average year the total use of water in the district amounts to 15,143 hm3/year, being the Total Water Renewable Water Resources 3909 hm3/year. On the other hand, the water service costs in Jucar RBD amounts to 1634 million per year at constant 2012 prices. It is noteworthy that 9% of these costs correspond to non-conventional resources, such as desalinated water, reused water and water transferred from other regions., The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments, suggestions and positive feedback. All remaining errors, however, are solely the responsibility of the authors. We would also like to express our gratitude to the Jucar River Basin Authority – Confederación Hidrográfica del Júcar (Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Environment) for providing data to develop this study. The authors wish to thank the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness for its financial support through the NUTEGES project (CGL2012-34978). We also value the support provided by the European Community's Seventh Framework Program in financing the projects ENHANCE (FP7-ENV2012, 308438) and IMPREX (H2020-WATER-2014-2015, 641811).