Managing Events and Extremes in Water Supplies

Surface water supplies are the predominate source of drinking water and are highly important and to the health and economy of Sweden and the EU.

They are also vulnerable to the impacts of hydro-climatic extreme events, which can include either extreme amounts of precipitation or the lack of precipitation (drought).

In either case, the effects of these events are most often evaluated in terms of hydrologic inflows to a drinking water supply.

The goal of this project is to further consider the effects of extreme events on the water withdrawn from a water supply, which often occurs at a significant distance and travel time from the main river inflows.

This project will develop a freely available open source 3D lake/reservoir modelling system that can simulate the longitudinal, lateral and vertical transport of nutrients and DOC that enter drinking water supplies. A modular modeling structure will allow coupling of biogeochemical models to simulate processing during transport.

This will be used to answer complex questions of how transport time and internal processing of nutrients and DOC affect water quality, how the state of a watershed (soil moisture) and a lake/reservoir (thermal structure) influence the effects of extreme events.

The project will be demonstrated in Sweden (Lake Malaren), Israel (Lake Kinneret) and an important water supply reservoir in Germany which in total serve many millions of consumers.