Drought Forecast and Water Management System for the semi-arid region of the state of Ceara, Brazil

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This proposal for a Knowledge Transfer Project aims at making the knowledge and scientific results generated in two earlier DFG-funded research projects available for applications in water management and planning. The particular application focus of this project will be to transfer the methods and results from those research projects for future use in a Drought Forecasting and Management System. The two projects referred were: Sediment Export from large Semi-Arid catchments: Measurements and Modelling, and Generation, transport and retention of water and suspended sediments in large dryland catchments: Monitoring and integrated modelling of fluxes and connectivity phenomena. The application partner in this project is the Foundation for Meteorology and Water Resources of Ceara State in NE-BRAZIL (FUNCEME), who is also in charge for hydro-meteorological predictions of Ceara's hydro-system characterized by a strongly negative climatic water balance and several thousand (mostly small) reservoirs. We intend to combine the existing information system for water management and allocation SIGA from FUNCEME with the process based hydrological model WASA-SED. The WASA-SED model, which resulted from the mentioned DFG projects, was developed specifically for semi-arid meso-scale catchments as a tool for investigating hydrological fluxes, including transport and connectivity phenomena in the river system and reservoirs. The application challenge will be addressed on several levels: (1) Integrating the WASA-SED model with the SIGA-system in order to enable water authorities a direct and efficient insight in reservoir levels, river flow, and other regional water resources; (2) Efficiently communicate the results of hydrological stocks and fluxes for a wide range of stakeholder groups and enable further use of those; (3) Using WASA-SED in a forecast mode, i.e. combine it with both short-term and seasonal meteorological forecasts to predict water availability with different lead times and to describe the associated uncertainty; (4) Taking advantage of the process-oriented type of WASA-SED to assess effects of dynamic environmental conditions on water availability, in particular the effects of the dense network of reservoirs of highly varying sizes. Feedbacks to new scientific questions are expected from the application-oriented integration of water infrastructure and management in the process chain of the model: (1) Assessing and modelling the seasonal dynamics of transmission losses in semi-arid river systems and deriving an adequate approach for river routing under such boundary conditions. (2) The quantification and modeling of hydrological and sedimentological connectivity in a complex, man-made hydro system, comprising, e.g. many small and large reservoirs, water transpositions structures, and partially connected sub-basins.