Activities undertaken in the framework of IHP in the period June 2016 — May 2018

Basic information on the centre

Name of the Centre: International Center for Integrated Water Resources Management

E-mail: iciwarm@gmail.com

Website: http://www.iciwarm.org

Location of centre: Alexandria, Virginia, USA

Geographic orientation: Global

Year of establishment: Formalities concluded 2016

Year of renewal assessment: n.a.

Signature date of most recent Agreement: 29 October 2009

Focal Areas:

  • Arid / semi-arid zones humid tropics
  • Water related disasters (drought/floods) Erosion/sedimentation, and landslides ecohydrology/ecosystems
  • Transboundary river basins/ aquifers mathematical modelling hydroinformatics
  • Global and change and impact assessment mathematical modelling

Scope of Activities: 

  • Research
  • Institutional capacity-building advising/ consulting
  • Data-sets/data-bases development

Sources of financial support:

  • USACE (base- and project-based funding)
  • USDOS Transboundary waters funding)
  • USAID (project-based funding)
  • NASA and NOAA (in-kind funding)

Partner institutions:

Universities: University of Arizona, Colorado State University, Oregon State University, University of California, Irvine and Princeton University.

Professional Societies: American Society of Civil Engineers, American Water Resources Association, and National Ground Water Association.

International Non-Governmental Associations: Alliance for Global Water Adaptation, North American Network of Basin Organizations, The Nature Conservancy

 

Institutional affiliation of director: Institute for Water Resources, US Army Corps of Engineers

 

ACTIVITIES UNDERTAKEN IN THE FRAMEWORK OF IHP IN THE PERIOD JUNE 2016 – APRIL 2018

 

Training and Capacity Building

Conducted Collaborative Model Verification and Development Workshop for the Mekong River Commission. Vientiane, Lao PDR, 13-14 November 2017.

Led Shared Vision Planning Pilot for Tisza River Basin riparians, Budapest, Hungary, 25-27 October 2017.

Chaired panel and participated in UNESCO’s Regional workshop on climate services for improved water resources management for Southern Africa. Harare, Zimbabwe, 30 January – 2 February 2018.

Conducted Collaborative Risk-Informed Decision Analysis (CRIDA) Technical Exchange. Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok, Thailand, 25-26 September 2017.

Mekong River Commission Joint Committee Meeting and Workshop on Building Capacity in Shared Vision Planning and Negotiation for Sustainable Water Resource Management. Phuket, Thailand, 25- 26 June, 2017.

Co-organized and provided several trainers for Technical Workshop on Climate Change Risk, Vulnerability Assessment and Early Warning for Africa. Niamey, Niger, 13-16 June 2017.

Developed and co-conducted hands-on training in the use of Collaborative Modeling in IWRM at Global Water Partnership meeting. Accra, Ghana, April 11-12, 2017.

Cosponsored and conducted Third ASEAN Academic Network Technical Training Workshop for Water and Disaster Management. Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand. 24-26 January, 2017.

Supported software development for G-WADI Workshop on the African Flood and Drought Monitor. Harare, Zimbabwe, 9-11 November, 2016.

Developed and conducted a Workshop on Shared Vision Planning for Green Infrastructure to Reduce Urban Flood Risk. Udon Thani, Thailand, 19-23 September 2016.

Held meeting to presents results of Tuul River, Mongolia Groundwater Model to Decision Makers. Ulan Bator, Mongolia, 12-16 September, 2016.

Designed and conducted a Multi-Hazard “Tournament” for stakeholders in the Iowa-Cedar river basin – A UNESCO HELP basin in Minnesota and Iowa, USA. Cedar Rapids, IA, USA,1 September 2016.

Led training workshop to help prepare a project management plan using a Shared Vision Planning (SVP) process for the city of Santiago de Caballeros, Dominican Republic. 19-21 June 2016.

Collaborated with NASA ARSET and UNESCO on course on “Application of Satellite Remote Sensing to Support Water Resources Management in Latin America and the Caribbean”. Foz do Iguacu, Brazil, 18 July 2016.

Supported development at Princeton of the Latin American Flood and Drought Monitor in preparation for at a workshop on “Advancing the Implementation of the Latin American Flood and Drought Monitor at the National Level”. Santiago, Chile, 23-24 May 2016.

Applied Research

Supported further upgrades of the African-Flood-and-Drought-Monitor, helping lead to applications in Health, Epidemiology and Migration studies in addition to drought resilience studies. 2017-2018.

Supported development of the Multi-Source Weighted-Ensemble Precipitation (MSWEP) 2.1 – a new fully global historic precipitation dataset (1979–2016) with a 3-hourly temporal and 0.1° spatial resolution. Released 20 November 2017.

Developed capability for the Hydrologic Engineering Center’s (HEC) Hydrologic Modeling System (HEC-HMS) to import gridded rainfall data globally. 20 May 2017.

Meetings held and some chapters written for proposed UNESCO publication on “Risk-Based Hydrologic Engineering Standards under Climate Uncertainty”. 2016-2018.

Provided support for development of “iRain – An Integrated System for Global Real-time Precipitation Observation” combining real-time rainfall information, citizen science and social media. Apps are available for PCs, iOS and Android. 2016.

G-WADI and other UNESCO Meetings

G-WADI Administration

Helped support travel for the 7th Asian G-WADI Meeting and Workshop. Hyderabad, India, 26-30 November 2017.

Presented and moderated at UNESCO Seminar on Rainwater Harvesting Techniques: A Tool to Deal with Water Scarcity. Santiago, Chile, 9-10 March 2017.

Helped support travel to, spoke at and helped summarize G-WADI’s strategic planning workshop on “More than a decade enhancing water and sustainable development for arid regions”, which resulted in the 2017 UNESCO strategic report on “G-WADI: The Path Ahead”. Beijing, China, 25-27 October 2016.

Other UNESCO Meetings

Moderator, Eighth World Water Forum Side Event on “Addressing Water Security and Climate Change Impacts in Vulnerable Regions” focusing on “the challenges of water resources management under climate change in drylands and mountainous regions of Latin America and the Caribbean.” Brasilia, Brazil, 22 March 2018

Organizing committee, Eighth World Water Forum session on Uncertainty and limitation of Science and Science Communication, in Climate science and water management: the communication between science and decision/policy making. Brasilia, Brazil, 22 March, 2018.

Member of Session Coordination Group (Will Logan) and panelist (Will Veatch), session on “Do not reinvent the wheel: Many non-regret adaptation measure are already available!”, in Climate: Water and adaptation to climate change. Brasilia, Brazil, 21 March 2018.

Participated in, and co-led G-WADI break-out session at, meeting of IHP National Committees, Centers, Chairs and Programs for Latin America and the Caribbean. Nassau, Bahamas, 18-20 September 2017.

ICIWaRM Director gave several talks at IHP-organized events at Water and Climate Day, COP22, and was accompanied by UC-Irvine developer of the real-time precipitation product iRain (see elsewhere in this report). Marrakech, Morocco, 9 November 2016.

ICIWaRM director chaired and/or moderated several working groups and reported at plenary sessions during the Meeting of 47 UNESCO Category 2 Science and Engineering Centers. Beijing, China 16- 18 May 2016.

ICIWaRM deputy director attended a meeting of the Region 1 National Committees and Centers of the International Hydrological Program (IHP). Koblenz, Germany, 24-25 May 2016.

Education

ICIWaRM’s partner institution—Oregon State University—graduated their first class for the Water Cooperation and Diplomacy Degree Master’s Program, jointly with IHE-Delft and UPeace, in 2017.

The first IHE-Delft Master’s student with an ICIWaRM Mentor completed his thesis on “Developing climate-resilient strategies for hydropower production using a risk-based approach: The case of the Magdalena River basin in Colombia”. A paper based on this thesis has been submitted to the PHI- LAC journal Aqua-LAC.

Boards

Member of Editorial Board of Aqua-LAC, the journal of IHP for Latin America and the Caribbean.

Member of Governing Board of the International Centre for Water Resources and Global Change (ICWRGC), under the auspices of UNESCO. Koblenz, Germany.

Member of the Governing Board of the Regional Water Center for Arid and Semi-Arid Zones in Latin America and the Caribbean (CAZALAC), under the auspices of UNESCO, La Serena, Chile.

Collaboration and linkages with other centers and chairs

ICIWaRM welcomed delegations from South Korea’s K-Water and UNESCO Category 2 “International Centre for Water Security and Sustainable Management (i-WSSM) on two occasions—7 June and 4 December 2017.

ICIWaRM participated in the International Symposium on Water Diplomacy, held on 16-17 November 2016 in Stockholm, Sweden. A professor from ICIWaRM’s partner institution Oregon State University gave one of the keynote addresses. The meeting was hosted by the International Centre for Water Cooperation in collaboration with the International Centre for Water Resources and Global Change, Koblenz, Germany—both UNESCO category 2 centers. A fourth UNESCO center, the Centre for Water Law, Policy and Science of Dundee, Scotland, also played a key role.

ICIWaRM signed a memorandum of understanding with the European Regional Centre for Ecohydrology (ERCE) in Lodz, Poland. 17 May 2016.

The June 2018 Shared Vision Planning workshop for the city of Santiago de Caballeros, Dominican Republic, detailed above, was an outgrowth of our relationship with INDRHI, the parent body of CEHICA, under the auspices of UNESCO.

The July 2016 NASA ARSET-IHP-ICIWaRM course on “Application of Satellite Remote Sensing to Support Water Resources Management in Latin America and the Caribbean” that took place at Foz do Iguacu, Brazil built on the network of relationships with the International Hydroinformatics Centre at Itaipu Binacional.

ICIWaRM wrote a letter of support for creation of the new (2018) Florida International University UNESCO Chair on Sustainable Water Security.

Communication

ICIWaRM’s primary communications mechanism is through its website, http://www.iciwarm.org (which redirects to https://www.iciwarm.info). The site had to be migrated from http://iciwarm.sites.usa.gov in early 2018, due to the shutting down of the US government site-hosting system.

ICIWaRM’s partner, the University of Arizona, hosts the G-WADI website (http://www.gwadi.org). This had to be migrated within UA in 2017-2018 due to server and security issues.

Update on Centre Operations

ICIWaRM’s founding director, Mr. Robert Pietrowsky, retired in June 2018. Following a series of acting directors, Dr. William Logan was named director in April 2018. Other leadership changed in the period 2016-2018. Dr. Joe Manous replaced Mr. Pietrowsky as Director of the Institute for Water Resources—the host institute for ICIWaRM. Mr. James Dalton replaced Mr. Steve Stockton as the Director of Civil Works for the US Army Corps of Engineers. And Mr.

R.D. James assumed the role of Assistant Secretary of the Army (Civil Works), replacing Ms. Jo Ellen Darcy. The Assistant Secretary chairs ICIWaRM’s Advisory Board.

Evidence of the Centre’s Impacts

In addition to the numbers of participants trained at training courses and workshops that ICIWaRM has (co-)organized or participated in, some metrics of ICIWaRM’s success are:

  • The iRain website has had 305,000 visits from 189 countries.
  • Downloads of precipitation data from UC-Irvine’s Center for Hydrometeorology and Remote Sensing have more than doubled every year from 0.5 terabytes (~one trillion bytes) in 2013 to a projected ~20 terabytes in 2018. ICIWaRM began directly supporting CHRS around 2012.
  • The African Flood and Drought Monitor, in 2016-18 alone, has been applied to problems as diverse as human migration, human and ruminant epidemiology, drought resilience, and impacts of irrigation dams on growth rates.
  • The World Bank’s Water Global Practice has begun funding Princeton to develop high- resolution versions of the Flood and Drought Monitor to both the Lake Chad basin as well as the Salado River basin in Argentina. IHP and other UNESCO entities are also engaged directly in the former.
  • The US State Department has signed a three-year agreement to fund ICIWaRM for transboundary water cooperation work.

Future activities that will contribute directly to IHP and/or to WWAP

We anticipate continuing to work closely with the G-WADI Program, as Global Technical Secretariat, on existing initiatives described above, as well as on two more recent IHP initiatives. These are a) adapting the Latin American Drought Atlas based on regional frequency analysis to the African context, and b) support for G-WADI water harvesting activities, with leadership from the Regional Center for Water Harvesting, a category 2 center in Khartoum, Sudan.

With modest multi-year funding in place from the State Department, we anticipate continued efforts to assist in transboundary water management, and with a publication on Collaborative Risk-Informed Decision Analysis near completion, we believe that this will create a demand signal for assistance in adaptation to changing conditions for water resources management.

Activities in the framework of the SDGs

ICIWaRM plans to continue supporting IHP in their efforts to address the water-related SDGs, through our involvement in IHP-VIII theme 1 (Water-related disasters and hydrological change) and 3 (Addressing water scarcity and water quality).

Annex: Publications from the 2016-2018 reporting period from the ICIWaRM Secretariat or partner institutions, related to ICIWaRM supported products or approaches, are listed in this section. Some are from the peer-reviewed literature; others are abstracts. The list is likely incomplete.

Abitew, T.A., Roy, T., Serrat-Capdevila, A., van Griensven, A., Bauwens, W. and Valdes, J.B., 2016, February. Simulating Streamflow Using Bias-corrected Multiple Satellite Rainfall Products in the Tekeze Basin, Ethiopia. In AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts.

Beck, H., Yang, L., Pan, M., Wood, E.F. and Logan, W., 2017, December. MSWEP V2 global 3-hourly 0.1° precipitation: methodology and quantitative appraisal. In AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts.

Beck, H.E., Vergopolan, N., Pan, M., Levizzani, V., van Dijk, A.I., Weedon, G.P., Brocca, L., Pappenberger, F., Huffman, G.J. and Wood, E.F., 2017. Global-scale evaluation of 22 precipitation datasets using gauge observations and hydrological modeling. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 21(12), p.6201.

Buytaert, W., Logan, W., Li, X., Mishra, A., Amani, A., Verbist, K., Nishimura, Y., Gift, R., Thulstrup, H., Ramasamy, J., Nguyen, P., and Hsu, K. 2017. G-WADI: The Way Forward. UNESCO: Paris.

Demaria, E.M., Roy, T., Valdés, J.B., Lyon, B., Valdés-Pineda, R., Serrat-Capdevila, A., Durcik, M. and Gupta, H., 2017, December. Short-term climate change impacts on Mara basin hydrology. In AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts.

Demaria, E. M., J. B. Valdes, S. Wi, A. Serrat-Capdevila, R. Valdés-Pineda, and M. Durcik. “Evaluating the performance of real-time streamflow forecasting using multi-satellite precipitation products in the Upper Zambezi, Africa.” In AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts. 2016.

Ehsani, N., Vörösmarty, C.J., Fekete, B.M. and Stakhiv, E.Z., 2017. Reservoir operations under climate change: Storage capacity options to mitigate risk. Journal of Hydrology, 555, pp.435-446.

Ekeu-Wei, I., Blackburn, G.A. and Ihuaku, A.K., 2016, September. Sustainable development, climate variability and data limitation in flood management. In International Conference on Sustainable Development: The Science-Policy-Implementation Interface for Disaster Resiliency & Adaptation Duration: 21 (pp. 177-178).

Gilroy, K., Mens, M., Haasnoot, M. and Jeuken, A., 2016, April. Climate Risk Informed Decision Analysis: A Hypothetical Application to the Waas Region. In EGU General Assembly Conference Abstracts (Vol. 18, p. 8808).

Gilroy, K. and Jeuken, A., 2018. Collaborative Risk Informed Decision Analysis: A water security case study in the Philippines. Climate Services.

Gilroy, K. and Gomez Dueñas. Climate Risk Informed Decision Analysis: Water Security Case Study in the Philippines. In AWRA Summer Specialty Conference on Climate Change Solutions: Collaborative Science, Policy and Planning. 2017.

Gómez Dueñas, S. and K. Gilroy. Developing Climate-Resilient Strategies for Hydropower Generation Using an Risk-Based Approach: The Case of the Magdalena River Basin in Colombia. In AWRA Summer Specialty Conference on Climate Change Solutions: Collaborative Science, Policy and Planning. 2017.

Jeuken, A., Mendoza, G., Matthews, J., Ray, P., Haasnoot, M., Gilroy, K., Olsen, R., Kucharski, J., Stakhiv, G., Cushing, J. and Brown, C., 2016, April. Climate risk informed decision analysis (CRIDA): A novel practical guidance for climate resilient investments and planning. In EGU General Assembly Conference Abstracts (Vol. 18, p. 8797).

Karbalaee, N., Hsu, K.L., Sorooshian, S., Kirstetter, P. and Hong, Y., 2016, February. Improving PERSIANN-CCS rain estimation using probabilistic approach and multi-sensors information. In AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts.

Kucharski, J., Tkach, M., Olszewski, J., Chaudhry, R. and Mendoza, G., 2016, April. The Application of Climate Risk Informed Decision Analysis to the Ioland Water Treatment Plant in Lusaka, Zambia. In EGU General Assembly Conference Abstracts (Vol. 18, p. 8842).

Mendoza, G. and Khero, Z., 2016. Building Pakistan’s resilience to flood disasters in the Indus River basin. In Increasing Resilience to Climate Variability and Change (pp. 81-110). Springer, Singapore.

Mendoza, G., M. Tkach, J. Kucharski, and R. Chaudhry. “Economic Justification Of Robust Or Adaptive Planning And Design Of Resilient Water Resources Systems Under Deep Uncertainty: A Case Study In The Iolanda Water Treatment Plant Of Lusaka, Zambia.” In AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts. 2017.

Muste, M., Carson, A., Xu, H. and Mocanu, M., 2017, September. Community engagement in water resources planning using serious gaming. In Intelligent Computer Communication and Processing (ICCP), 2017 13th IEEE International Conference on (pp. 445-451). IEEE.

Nguyen, P., Ombadi, M., Ashouri, H., Thorstensen, A., Hsu, K.L., Braithwaite, D., Sorooshian, S. and Logan, W., 2017, December. A review of the PERSIANN family global satellite precipitation data products. In AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts.

Nguyen, P., Sorooshian, S., Hsu, K.L., Gao, X., AghaKouchak, A., Braithwaite, D., Thorstensen, A.R., Ashouri, H., Tran, H., Huynh, P. and Palacios, T., 2016, February. UC Irvine CHRS RainSphere-a new user friendly tool for analyzing global remotely sensed rainfall estimates. In AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts.

Nguyen, P., Sorooshian, S., Thorstensen, A., Tran, H., Huynh, P., Pham, T., Ashouri, H., Hsu, K., AghaKouchak, A. and Braithwaite, D., 2017. Exploring Trends through “RainSphere”: Research data transformed into public knowledge. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 98(4), pp.653-658.

Nguyen, P., Thorstensen, A., Sorooshian, S., Hsu, K., AghaKouchak, A., Ashouri, H., Tran, H. and Braithwaite, D., 2017. Global precipitation trends across spatial scales using satellite observations. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, (2017).

Poff, N.L., Brown, C.M., Grantham, T.E., Matthews, J.H., Palmer, M.A., Spence, C.M., Wilby, R.L., Haasnoot, M., Mendoza, G.F., Dominique, K.C. and Baeza, A., 2016. Sustainable water management under future uncertainty with eco-engineering decision scaling. Nature Climate Change, 6(1), p.25.

Roy, T., Serrat‐Capdevila, A., Gupta, H. and Valdes, J., 2017. A platform for probabilistic Multimodel and Multiproduct Streamflow Forecasting. Water Resources Research, 53(1), pp.376-399.

Roy, T., Serrat-Capdevila, A., Valdes, J., Durcik, M. and Gupta, H., 2017. Design and implementation of an operational multimodel multiproduct real-time probabilistic streamflow forecasting platform. Journal of Hydroinformatics, 19(6), pp.911-919.

Serrat-Capdevila, A., Merino, M., Valdes, J.B. and Durcik, M., 2016. Evaluation of the performance of three satellite precipitation products over Africa. Remote Sensing, 8(10), p.836.

Shearer, E.J., Nguyen, P., Ombadi, M., Palacios, T., Huynh, P., Furman, D., Tran, H., Braithwaite, D., Hsu, K.L., Sorooshian, S. and Logan, W.S., 2017, December. Real-Time Tracking of the Extreme Rainfall of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria using UCI CHRS’s iRain System. In AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts.

Shinde, V., R. Koh, M.S. Babel, and G. Mendoza. Reducing the Vulnerability of Bangkok Municipal Water Supply to Climate Change. In AWRA Summer Specialty Conference on Climate Change Solutions: Collaborative Science, Policy and Planning. 2017.

Sorooshian, S., Nguyen, P. and Hsu, K.L., 2017, December. Satellite-based Monitoring of global Precipitation using the PERSIANN system: from Weather-to Climate-scales with some application examples. In AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts.

Stakhiv, E.Z., Werick, W. and Brumbaugh, R.W., 2016. Evolution of drought management policies and practices in the United States. Water Policy, 18(S2), pp.122-152.

Stakhiv, E. Practical Risk-Based Adaptation Pathways for Water Resources Infrastructure. In AWRA Summer Specialty Conference on Climate Change Solutions: Collaborative Science, Policy and Planning. 2017.

Timmerman, J., Matthews, J., Koeppel, S., Valensuela, D. and Vlaanderen, N., 2017. Improving governance in transboundary cooperation in water and climate change adaptation. Water Policy, p.wp2017156.

Tkach, M., J. Kucharski, J. Olszewski, R. Chaudhry and G. Mendoza. Developing a Climate Resilient Water Supply for Lusaka, Zambia. In AWRA Summer Specialty Conference on Climate Change Solutions: Collaborative Science, Policy and Planning. 2017.

Tran, H., Nguyen, P., Huynh, P., Palacios, T., Braithwaite, D., Hsu, K.L. and Sorooshian, S., 2016, February. UC Irvine CHRS iRain-An Integrated System for Global Real-time Precipitation Observation. In AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts.

Valdés-Pineda, R., Demaría, E.M., Valdés, J.B., Wi, S. and Serrat-Capdevila, A., 2016. Bias correction of daily satellite-based rainfall estimates for hydrologic forecasting in the Upper Zambezi, Africa. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 437, pp.1-28.

Valdés-Pineda, R., Valdes, J.B., Serrat-Capdevila, A., Wi, S., Demaria, E.M., Roberts, J.B. and Robertson, F.R., 2016, February. Skill Analysis of Seasonal Hydrologic Streamflow Forecasting for the Upper Zambezi, Africa. In AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts.

Yang, Z., Hsu, K., Sorooshian, S., Xu, X., Braithwaite, D., Zhang, Y. and Verbist, K.M., 2017. Merging High‐resolution Satellite‐based Precipitation Fields and Point‐scale Rain‐gauge Measurements— A Case Study in Chile. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.

Yang, Z., Hsu, K., Sorooshian, S., Xu, X., Braithwaite, D. and Verbist, K.M., 2016. Bias adjustment of satellite‐based precipitation estimation using gauge observations: A case study in Chile. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 121(8), pp.3790-3806.