The IWAS-ToolBox: Software coupling for an integrated water resources management

Abstract

Numerical modeling of interacting flow and transport processes between different hydrological compartments, such as the atmosphere/land surface/vegetation/ soil/groundwater systems, is essential for understanding the comprehensive processes, especially if quantity and quality of water resources are in acute danger, like e.g. in semi-arid areas and regions with environmental contaminations. The computational models used for system and scenario analysis in the framework of an integrated water resources management are rapidly developing instruments. In particular, advances in computational mathematics have revolutionized the variety and the nature of the problems that can be addressed by environmental scientists and engineers. It is certainly true that for each hydro-compartment, there exists many excellent simulation codes, but traditionally their development has been isolated within the different disciplines. A new generation of coupled tools based on the profound scientific background is needed for integrated modeling of hydrosystems. The objective of the IWAS-ToolBox is to develop innovative methods to combine and extend existing modeling software to address coupled processes in the hydrosphere, especially for the analysis of hydrological systems in sensitive regions. This involves, e.g. the provision of models for the prediction of water availability, water quality and/or the ecological situation under changing natural and socio-economic boundary conditions such as climate change, land use or population growth in the future.

Integrated Water Resources Management under different hydrological, climatic and socio-economic conditions

“…The idea of developing a ToolBox was to provide interfaces for combining existing simulation tools to answer specific questions related to coupled hydrosystems (Kolditz et al 2008;Kalbacher et al 2011a). Examples are (1) investigating the interaction of roots and soil to better understand the mechanisms of water uptake (Kalbacher et al 2011b), (2) studying the interaction between surface and subsurface water in the River Bug model area in particular to better understand the mechanisms of hydrograph separation and mass exchange between different hydro-compartments (Delfs et al 2009(Delfs et al , 2011, (3) setting up models of the wastewater systems based on little information ) and linking them with a river model, (4) climate projections ), (5) future scenarios development (Schanze et al 2011). The development of concepts and tools for data integration and visualization (Rink et al 2011) became an important prerequisite for hydrological process analysis.…”

Improved representation of groundwater at a regional scale – coupling of mesocale Hydrologic Model (mHM) with OpeneGeoSys (OGS)

“…For example, models for predicting groundwater storage change under either climate change (e.g., global warming) or human-induced scenarios (e.g., 25 agricultural pumping) always use a constant or linear expression to represent spatially distributed recharge (Danskin, 1999;Selle et al, 2013). The groundwater numerical models may contain some packages or interfaces to simulate surface water or unsaturated zone processes (Harbaugh et al, 2000;Kalbacher et al, 2012;. Those packages always need extra data and right characterization of many topographical and geological properties.…”

“…We choose two highly-scalable, open-source codes with high reputations and wide popularities in their corresponding fields: the mesoscale Hydrologic Model mHM (Samaniego et al, 2010;Kumar et al, 2013;Samaniego et al, 2013) and the THMC simulator OpenGeoSys Wang et al, 2009;Kalbacher et al, 2012). The coupling is achieved by mechanistically 15 accounting for the spatio-temporal dynamics of mHM generated groundwater recharge and baseflow as boundary conditions to the OGS model as a off-line coupled mode.…”

Integrated Water Resource Management and Energy Requirements for Water Supply in the Copiapó River Basin, Chile

“…Thus, DSS tools must combine physically based, integrated surface-subsurface hydrology models [10,11] with other models that can represent several aspects of water resources planning and management, land-use change and environmental vulnerability [12][13][14]. For instance, Kalbus et al [12] introduced IWRM with DSS tools under different hydrological, climatic and socio-economic conditions aiming to develop specific solutions as a response to water-related problems.…”