Open Hydrosystem Information Network: Greece’s new research infrastructure for water

The Open Hydrosystem Information Network (OpenHi.net) is a state-of-the-art information infrastructure for the collection, management and free dissemination of hydrological and environmental information related to Greece’s surface water resources. It was launched two years ago as part of a the national research infrastructure “Hellenic Integrated Marine Inland water Observing, Forecasting and offshore Technology System” (HIMIOFoTS), which also comprises a marine-related component (https://www.himiofots.gr/). The OpenHi.net system receives and processes real-time data from automatic telemetric stations that are connected to a common web environment (https://openhi.net/). In particular, for each monitoring site it accommodates stage measurements, raw and automatically post-processed. Furthermore, in some specially selected sites time series related to water quality characteristics (pH, water temperature, salinity, DO, electrical conductivity) are provided. The web platform also offers automatically-processed information in terms of discharge data, statistics, and graphs, alerts for extreme events, as well as geographical data associated with surface water bodies. At the present time, the network comprises about 20 stations. However, their number is continuously increasing, due to the open access policy of the system (the platform is fully accessible to third-parties uploading their data). In the long run, it is envisioned that a national-scale hydrometric infrastructure will be established, covering all important rivers, lakes and reservoirs of the country.