Das Projekt "ROOT Erosion Dynamics and the Nonlinear Effect of Strenghtening of river alluvial Sediments (ROOTEDNESS) - Alpine environmental Dynamics And the sustainable MAnagement of Non-Traditional water uses (ADAMANT)" wird vom Umweltbundesamt gefördert und von Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Laboratoire de Recherches en Economie et Management de l'Environnement durchgeführt. ADAMANT is an ambitious professorship program aimed at understanding and modeling, at a coherent level of detail, coupled Alpine environmental processes in the mountain, piedmont and lowland. The hypothesis is that such an understanding will provides fundamental insights to the (non-traditional) use of water in the riparian ecosystem, and therefore explain why and how changes in river hydrology due to water impoundment will affect the riparian biodiversity across space and time scales. These points define the research objectives targeted by ADAMANT: 1. The assessment of the origin and the role of nonlinearities in the routing dynamics of glacierized basins, and related linkages to the probabilistic behaviour of equilibrium snowlines; 2. The experimental definition of (objective) benefit functions for the use of water by the riparian environment in relation to the statistical effects of both floods and moderate flows; 3. The (analytical and numerical) solution to the optimal water allocation problem between traditional and non-traditional water uses under changing scenarios such climatic, economic, operational. The project ADAMANT will accordingly be carried out in 3 interconnected research modules involving 2 Ph.D's and one Postdoc. The work foreseen in ADAMANT will account for field monitoring campaigns and experiments, linear and nonlinear data analysis, and modelling of the above said mountain, piedmont and lowland processes. In particular, the mathematical modelling approach will be of minimalist type whenever a fully physically based (distributed) approach is precluded or not convenient to reproduce statistically significant long-term scenarios. In this manner, overparametrization due to excessive model complexity will be avoided on the one hand, and the model will remain mathematically tractable for the possible search of elegant analytical solutions, on the other hand. ADAMANT research goals are particularly interesting in a time when energy production from hydropower is still among the most used techniques, especially in glacierized basins of alpine countries. From a practical viewpoint ADAMANT will help define new operational rules and guidelines for Environmental Flow Requirements. Overall, this project will provide an integrated and sustainable water management study in impounded alpine riparian ecosystems, and in harmony with present and future countrywide plans of river restoration and renaturalization strategies.
Das Projekt "Hydrologic Prediction in Alpine Environments II" wird vom Umweltbundesamt gefördert und von Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Faculte ENAC, IIE, Laboratoire d'ecohydrologie durchgeführt. Proposed research: This research programme proposes to analyze the predictability of the hydrologic behaviour of Alpine ecosystems at the spatio-temporal scales relevant for water management, i.e. at spatial scales of between 200 km2 (e.g. a hydropower production catchment) and around 5000 km2 (e.g. flood management of the Swiss Rhone catchment) and at temporal scales ranging from hours to seasons. Research context: Quantitative stream flow predictions are essential for the sustainable management of our natural and man-made environment and for the prevention of natural hazards. Despite of ever better insights into the involved physical processes at the point scale, many existing catchment scale runoff prediction models still show a lack of reliability for stream flow prediction. The present research programme addresses this foremost issue in Alpine environments, which are the source of many major European rivers and play a dominant role for hydropower production and flood protection. Stream flow prediction in such environments is particularly challenging due to the high spatial variability of the meteorological driving forces opposed to notorious data scarcity in remote and high elevation areas. Project context: The present proposal is a follow-up proposal of the Ambizione project Hydrologic Prediction in Alpine Environments. During the main phase of the project (3 years), certain essential research objectives could not be reached, due namely to the maternity leave of the principal investigator (PI), but also due to additional research questions that emerged at the very beginning of this research. The present follow-up project proposes to complete the research programme during a complementary project phase (2 years). Objectives: The main objective of this research programme is to assess under which conditions simple hydrological models can give reliable stream flow predictions in Alpine environments. This objective will be reached based on an analysis of the variability of natural flow generation processes and of the variability of corresponding state-of-the-art hydrological model outputs. During the main phase of the project, the research was concentrated on the analysis of flow generation processes related to snowmelt, which in Alpine areas dominate the hydrological response over a large part of the year. The achieved results include a new hourly snowmelt model combined to a spatially-explicit precipitation-runoff model, an improved snowfall-limit prediction method for hydrological models and a weather generator that produces coupled temperature and prediction scenarios to analyze how these two meteorological variables integrate to the snow-hydrological response.(...)