Impacts of land use and water resources management on hydrological processes under varying climatic conditions LUWR

LUWR is an international research project aimed at analysing the impacts of historical, current and future changes in climate variability, land use and water management on hydrological processes, for the purpose of mitigation of present and future risks to the public and ecosystems from extreme events (droughts and floods). 

Science questions 

The difficulty of separating the different causes of changes in the hydrological regime results from

• the complexity of interactions between climatic, land use and water management factors and the hydrological responses
• the uncertainties in, and scarcity of, available observations.

To tackle the complexity of land - surface hydrological interactions, we apply mapping from the parameter space of models of hydrological processes on to external forcing (an inverse problem). In other words, we want to focus on detecting changes in a data-based hydrological process description and relating them to changes in meteorological processes and other external forcing factors, such as changes in water management practices or land use.

To overcome the problem of limited observations, the case studies include both real data and data obtained from virtual experiments under controlled environmental conditions. The uncertainties of the observations and in the process description are of major importance and are dealt with using ensemble simulations of a regional climate model combined with Bayesian approach to derive parametric uncertainty and statistical tests for the change.

LUWR Participation

In this project we will combine the expertise of scientists from different countries working on both hydrological and meteorological aspects of the changing natural environment. The participation is open to all interested scientists and research groups that work or plan to work on similar problems.