New and Events Forthcoming Events Hydrological Sciences at the 2012 European Geoscience Union (EGU) The 2012 European Geosciences Union will be organised in Vienna on 22-27 April 2012. It will bring together geoscientists from all over the world into one meeting covering all disciplines of the Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences. Especially for young scientists, the EGU appeals to provide a forum to present their work and discuss their ideas with experts in all fields of geosciences. Within the area of hydrological sciences, we invite you to participate in the session on “Climate change and water infrastructure” co-organised by Dr. Maria Naranjo (Researcher at the Madrid Institute of Advanced Studies on Water, IMDEA-Water, Madrid, Spain); Dr. Cecilia Tortajada (past President of IWRA and Scientific Director of the International Centre on Water and Environment, Zaragoza, Spain); and Ms. Carla Arregoitia, ARRHER-Engineering, Mexico). The objective of this session is to analyse the impacts on water infrastructure due to changing climatic conditions. 3rd International Interdisciplinary conference on Predictions for Hydrology, Ecology and Water Resources Management: Water Resources and Changing Global Environment, 24-27 September 2012, Vienna, Austria Water resources systems being the main link between the people and the climate are affected by human activities (such as land use change) and climate change. Thus, any assumption related to stationarity of the water resources systems characteristics is highly questionable, maybe not valid any more. Direct human interactions with the water cycle are occurring at the small catchment scale while the climate change impacts dominate at the large catchment scale. However, there are examples of the opposite – impacts in large basins like the Aral Sea, the Tchad, and the Nile are caused by water management practices, while the hydrology of small high Alpine catchments with major contributions from glacier runoff is predominantly affected by climate change, with limited human impacts. There is a clear need for better understanding of complex interactions between water resources and global environment. This conference will focus on complexity and uncertainty as two main characteristics of global change. New tools for solving water resources problems will need to be developed, or existing tools will need to be adapted to respond to the challenges of global change. Complex dynamic water resources systems, bridging the span between ecosystems to climate, can have tipping points at which a sudden shift to a contrasting dynamic regime may occur. Although predicting such critical points before they are reached is extremely difficult, work in different scientific fields is now suggesting the existence of generic early-warning signals that may indicate for a wide class of water resources systems if a critical threshold is approaching. This conference has prediction as one of the main themes. The objectives of HydroPredict2012 conference are: to presentd tools and methods which assist in assessing and discriminating between human and climate change induced impacts on water resources systems to discuss the predictive capability of simulation models used for water resources issues, including the model output uncertainty to present tools and methods for adaptation to changing global conditions to address water management policy to reduce vulnerability and to increase the resilience of water resources systems to analyze the role of water resources within the complex social-economic-climatic system.
The conference will bring together professionals, scientists and members of governmental institutions dealing with water resources management. Representatives of natural, social and engineering sciences will meet together to exchange experience and present the current views on the adaptation and mitigation of adverse effects of global change on water resources systems. XV IWRA World Water Congress The XVth IWRA World Water Congress will be organised in the city of Granada, Spain in 2014. The local organisers are the University of Granada and Granada Exhibition and Conference Centre. Top |