Assessing future water availability using HydroRiver – A use case in the climate adaptation digital twin of the Destination Earth Program

The Sixth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change emphasized on the water cycle, and water-related disasters (i.e., water scarcity, droughts, floods) that impact all sectors and regions. Therefore, assessing future water availability is critical to develop mitigation strategies and formulate adaptation policies. While developing relevant information systems, it is critical to ensure the involvement of stakeholders in the field of policy development, communities impacted by future water availability (e.g., agriculture, fisheries, shipping industry), and private industries (e.g., paper and pulp, hydropower) to ensure that information presented can be useful to support decision making. Destination Earth (DestinE) aims to, among other products, to develop – on a global scale – a highly accurate digital model of the Earth to monitor and predict the interaction between natural phenomena and human activities. As part of the European Commission’s Green Deal and Digital Strategy, DestinE will contribute to achieving the objectives of the twin transition, green and digital.

 

High resolution climate simulations (ICON and IFS climate models) are used as meteorological forcings for the mesoscale Hydrological Model (mHM) to produce high temporal (1 hour) and spatial resolution (5 km) streamflow estimates at a global scale. The impact model consists of the mHM model, which includes key hydrological processes e.g., run-off, soil moisture dynamics, fast and slow interflow processes to estimate river discharge. The application prototype will provide: 1) co-designing the indicators and indices as well as application functionalities together with relevant stakeholders. 2) downscaling of the essential climate variables 3) providing bias correction for the climate variables 4) running the mHM model under various climate scenarios. In addition, the application will receive data through direct streaming from the climate simulations thus ensuring interactivity of the application for the users.

 

During the development phase of the DestinE digital twin, the climate simulations used in the current work are taken from the results of the NextGEMS project. They have been used to provide a proof of concept for the mHM model, and provide initial results for stakeholder engagement, and enable early involvement of stakeholders in the co-design of relevant applications.