MEASURING, STORAGE, TRANSMISSION AND DISSEMINATION OF HYDROLOGICAL DATA TO VARIOUS DECISION LEVELS (MOSYM)

Liliana Mâra, General Director MWFEP

Ion Sandu, General Director NIMHWR

Mary-Jeanne Adler, Senior Researcher

Increases of extreme weather conditions such as floods, storms and draughts as a result of the climate change imposed a reconsideration and adaptation of the hydrological information system, trying to assure an increasing anticipated time during forecasting.

The protection of life and of economic objectives is the main tasks of the hydrological forecast at the European Community level, with large implications mainly in the case of the transboundary rivers, which impose the utilization of common, modern methodology.

MOSYM is a demonstrative project, which intends “to enhance nature conservation through the management of land water and through the dissemination of related information, for the benefit of nature and the human enjoyment of it”.

This study aims to build on the concept of “Think Globally, Act Locally”. This is particularly relevant in the case of floods (Figure 1); floods are phenomena that affect everyone and thus, changes in planning water resources are most likely to have an immediacy of impact in changing people’s and enterprises’ behaviour and philosophy.

This project would like to provide a demonstration, promotion and technical assistance to the local authorities and MWFPE in reconsidering the concept of hydrological network, using an automatic hydrological information system integrated with a specialized database. In the last few years, following one of the main priorities in the field of environment, a new synthetic approach has been developed in water science and water management. One of the reasons for such a development is the importance of the links between climate, hydrological regime and land users. As floods are important processes in water management issues, they have to be given priority.

The perspective is to build, for flood management and damage mitigation, a European methodology with accepted standards, especially on vulnerability and risk maps implementation (risk = vulnerability / hazard), in which the key issues are transboundary waters. Also, because flood-related aspects have deep implications in social behavior, and a certain level of reluctance is observed among the actors who should take into account these realities, a structured effort is made to present the new knowledge under a "negotiable" form: negotiations for water volumes, and/or of land users, between the different communities and owners living all along the river.

The pilot basins have been selected for each specific climatic area of Romania; two of them are transboundary watercourses (Mures and Siret), therefore important under the terms of the Helsinki Convention. The Arges River, the third pilot basin from the southern part of Romania, has a major importance for Bucharest environment and water supply of the city.

The existing hydrological database does not satisfy all the demands of the daily water balance; it does not include all the directly measured or observed data, being centred on primary processed data. Also GIS coupling is useful both for process modelling and for data dissemination to local and government staff and to various users. The integration of the automatic database with GIS will increase the efficiency of the hydrological forecasts. This will permit:

Taking into account the large variety of the flow regime on the Romanian territory and the disastrous effects of the latest floods, the historical database will be used for the following:

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