AWARE project

Recent droughts observed in Alpine catchments and the downstream rivers indicate the need of an efficient technology to predict medium and long-term flows for sustainable water resources management.
The aim of the EC AWARE project is to provide innovative tools for monitoring and predicting water availability and distribution in those drainage basins where snowmelt is a major component of the annual water balance, a common condition in Alpine catchments. The project developed appropriate mathematical models to represent snow-pack dynamics and snowmelt runoff. These models have been expressly designed to integrate Earth Observation data and in-situ hydrological and meteorological measurements, introducing therefore a novel approach to the representation of the involved physical processes in time and space. Model innovation stems with the enhanced capability of Earth Observation data to provide continuous information on state variables that can be poorly accounted for using the traditional approach based on input-output control.
Among the studied models the snowmelt runoff model (SRM), developed by Martinec et al. (1983), seems to be particularly suitable to fit the environmental conditions of the Alpine catchments. The SRM is a deterministic distributed temperature index model which takes into consideration the precipitation and air temperature, along with all other predetermined catchments specific parameters.
The SRM has been successfully applied in different mountainous basins of the Alps (Seidel et al., 1989, Swamy and Brivio, 1997, Nagler and Rott, 1999). R in the framework of an ESA Data User Programme the model has been also successfully applied in Val d’Aosta Region (Italy) (Pepe et al., 2004).
In the framework of AWARE, SRM and other models have been implemented in a geo-service, fully compliant with Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards and the architecture of the Inspire European Directive. It is able of coupling global and local data to compute, archive, upgrade and distribute snow derived information, and tailoring data and models to different environments under an integrated approach capable of addressing the specific problems raising from different users.
This paper focuses on the use of AWARE online geo-service: its characteristics and the facilities offered to users will be illustrated. The case study is referred to the application of SRM to the Mallero river basin (Italian Central Alps) in order to evaluate the runoff. The aim is to show the reliability of the adopted approach and its suitability for Alpine basins by local users, who well know their area of interest but lack a particular know-how in hydrological models application.

References
Martinec J., Rango A. & Major E., (1983) The Snowmelt-Runoff Model (SRM) User's Manual. NASA Reference Publ. 1100, Washington, DC, USA.
Nagler T. and Rott H., (1999) SAR snowcover retrieval for snowmelt runoff modelling. Earth Observation Quarterly, ESA Vol. 62, pp. 29-31
Pepe M., P.A. Brivio, A. Rampini, F. Rota Nodari, M. Boschetti, (2005) Snow cover monitoring in alpine regions using Envisat optical data, Int. J. of Remote Sensing, Vol. 26 (21), pp. 4661-4667.
Seidel K., Ehrler C. and Martinec J., (1998), Effects of climate change on water resources and runoff in an alpine basin, Hydrological Processes , Vol. 12, pp. 1659–1669