Modeling the hydrological cycle of the Adige using the GEOframe system

River Adige is the second longest in Italy and affects the population living in the Trentino Alto Adige and the Venetian plain for irrigation. Having an area relatively small (~11000 square kilometers), it is however affected by a complexity of issues including: high anthropization causing intensive and often conflicting water uses, displacement of water resources from one sub-catchment to another, presence of seasonal snow cover with runoff delayed from snow falling season to late Spring and Summer, glaciers depletion under the climate change impulse. All those issues make the modeling of the water cycle of the river area challenging and, at the same time urgent.

This contribution has the objective to illustrate an effort to model the basin at high resolution with the aim to search for the closure of the water and energy budgets for the years of 1980-2018. Within this budgets simulation, we want to address a quantitative assessment of the effects of recent climate changes on the availability of the resource and, for what concern, the basin area evaluate the regional variability of the resource up to the scale of sub-catchments of area of around 5km². This is done with the help of the GEOframe modeling system (Formetta et al, 2014), an open-source, semi-distributed, component-based hydrological modeling system. The different components of the system enable to model different processes of the hydrological cycle: geomorphology, radiation, evapotranspiration, rainfall-snowmelt separation, discharge calculation and the try of different hypothesis on the work of the elementary hydrological components. The results are also compared with those of the analysis conducted in Thedoros et al., 2020.

References:

Formetta, G., A. Antonello, S. Franceschi, O. David, and R. Rigon. 2014. “Hydrological Modelling with Components: A GIS-Based Open-Source Framework.” Environmental Modelling & Software 55 (May): 190–200.

Mastrotheodoros, Theodoros, Christoforos Pappas, Peter Molnar, Paolo Burlando, Gabriele Manoli, Juraj Parajka, Riccardo Rigon, et al. 2020. “More Green and Less Blue Water in the Alps during Warmer Summers.” Nature Climate Change 10 (2): 155–61.