Maintaining operational services to share scientific knowledge and water data for a better world

Water is the basis for life and ultimately the reason why our society could develop the way it did, and thus, water security is an indirect core component in all 17 UN sustainable development goals. However, scientific water data and information are rarely accessible in an easy and understandable way for managers and policy makers. Moreover, hydrological sciences are fragmented with less tradition of sharing results, data and tools between scientists than in many other disciplines. Numerous efforts from development projects have launched prototypes and demonstrators of web-based applications to overcome these issues, but without long-term maintenance most of them disappear at project end. Here we will present experience from developing, maintaining and using three non-commercial operational services to facilitate actions in water security and promote scientific engagement with stakeholders.

https://hypeweb.smhi.se/ provides readily available modelled hydrological data for continent or global scale at sub-catchment resolution of some 100 km² (Arheimer et al., 2020), along with open source code with documentation and data compilation/visualization/training tools. The visitor can explore data for the past, present or future, download the numerical model, or order data subscriptions. SMHI has a long tradition of operational water predictions and also estimate status of water quality, design values for infrastructure, and the impact of climate change on water resources. The website is linked to an annual open (free) training course in HYPE modelling for various societal needs.

https://climateinformation.org/ offers access to three different tools to explore climate-change impact on water resources: 1) instant summary reports of climate change for any site on the globe, 2) easy access to many pre-calculated climate indicators, 3) a software package to calculate indicators by inserting local observations. The main purpose of this new service is to provide scientific data to argue for climate mitigation and adaptation investments in vulnerable countries (Photiadou et al., 2021). Pre-calculated water variables are based on a state-of-the-art production chain with global model ensembles from CMIP, Cordex, a global catchment model (WWH) and a rigorous quality assurance protocol.

https://dwg.smhi.se/dwg/ (prototype for a Digital Water Globe– address will change in February) is a brand-new platform to search and find (based on key-words) where on Earth there are: scientific results available from research projects (case-studies), monitoring programs (data repositories), publications (in HSJ, PIAHS) and researchers (personal profiles). The aim is to stimulate and facilitate engagement, interactions and dialogues among scientists and between scientists and stakeholders. The Digital Water Globe offers co-creation and re-examines the role of scientific outreach; it is a scientific community effort completely dependent on content from the users to explore networking and science communication in action.

The presentation will focus on obtained feedback, opportunities and challenges in running operational services with aim to share scientific data with a wide range of users.

 

References:

Arheimer et al., 2020: Global catchment modelling using World-Wide HYPE (WWH), open data and stepwise parameter estimation, HESS 24, 535–559, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-535-2020   

Photiadou et al. 2021. Designing a climate service for planning climate actions in vulnerable countries. Atmosphere 12:121. https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos12010121