AgHive organizes a workshop on WaPOR for Water Accounting Plus (WA+) Modeling under the TALANOA-WATER Project
Water Accounting: towards a clear understanding of proper water management in river basins
As part of the TALANOA-WATER project (2021-25) on integrated management of water resources in the Mediterranean, AgHive director Dr. Jaafar organized a workshop on FAO WaPOR for Water Accounting Plus (WA+) modeling approach.
Dr. Jaafar and the AgHive team conducted the online workshop on January 7, 2022 to train participants on running the Rapid Water Accounting Plus tool using the WaPOR data of a selected river basin study area.
TALANOA-WATER is a 4-year project, coordinated by the University of Salamanca, Spain, brings together an international scientific consortium of 7 partners from 6 countries: Lebanon, Tunisia, Egypt, Italy, France, and Spain. TALANOA-WATER is funded by Horizon 2020 European Union Funding for Research & lnnovation, and Partnership for Research and Innovation in the Mediterranean Area (PRIMA Foundation).
Water Accounting (WA) enables the identification of key issues in river basins, as well as restrictions and potentials for increased climate resilience. WA can be defined as the systematic acquisition, analysis and communication of data and information relating to stocks and fluxes of water in natural, disturbed or heavily engineered environments, within a geographical domain (Steduto, Faurès, Hoogeveen, Winpenny, & Burke, 2012).
The international workshop gathered members of the consortium partners from six countries: Spain, Italy, France, Egypt, Tunisia, and Lebanon. The workshop remarkably contributed to the broadening the technical knowledgebase of attendants who came from different scientific backgrounds. Several water labs delegated Master’s and PhD students from the various partner institutions.
Workshop Objectives:
- Prepare WaPOR data to calculate monthly water balance for WA+ purposes using Python scripting.
- View and evaluate the results of the water balance model
- Create sheet 1 of the WA + using Python code
The workshop covered five topics through a module for each: 1-Data Input Pre-processing; 2- Creation of input netCDF files for the Soil Water Balance Model; 3- Calculation of GRACE Water Storage Anomalies; 4- Running the Soil Water Balance Model for WA+; 5- Calculation of WA+ Sheet 1.
TALANOA-WATER is an innovation action designed at its core to inform and catalyze the adoption of robust transformational adaptation strategies to water scarcity under climate change.
- Steduto, P., Faurès, J. M., Hoogeveen, J., Winpenny, J., & Burke, J. (2012). Coping with Water Scarcity: An Action Framework for Agriculture and Food Security. Retrieved from Rome: https://www.fao.org/3/i3015e/i3015e.pdf
