ICIWaRM Assists with ICTP’s Fifth Workshop on Water Resources in Developing Countries

ICIWaRM helped support the Fifth Workshop on Water Resources in Developing Countries: Hydroclimate Modeling and Analysis Tools, held from 27 May – 7 Jun 2019. The local organizer was the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Trieste, Italy,

Hosts, organizers, lecturers and participants gather near the International Centre for Theoretical Physics. Photo credit: ICTP.

The Workshop was “addressed to researchers from developing regions working on hydro-climate modelling with the aim to foster international research and educational projects on topics related to climate and hydrology”, and was a contribution to the UNESCO G-WADI programme within the framework of ‘UNESCO IHP VIII (2014-2021), Water Security: Responses to Local Regional and Global Challenges’. ICIWaRM is the Global Technical Secretariat of G-WADI.

Prof. Soroosh Sorooshian, who directs the Center for Hydrometeorology & Remote Sensing (CHRS) at the University of California, Irvine organized the workshop with Marco Verdecchia of the University of L’Aquila, Italy along with local coorganizers. He and his CHRS colleague Dr. Phu Nguyen presented on various topics related to satellite-based precipitation estimation, with an emphasis on G-WADI affiliated tools of the PERSIANN family. This included the high resolution, real-time product PERSIANN-CCS and its iRain visualization platform, as well as the PERSIANN-CDR climate data records and their corresponding RainSphere platform for precipitation trend analysis since 1983. Drs. Sorooshian and Nguyen also worked extensively with participants in the lab sessions to develop applications using their own data.

The workshop was designed to “open new frontiers for the hydrological modeling community by bridging the spatial scale gap between regional climate models and impact models (hydrological models, ecosystem models, etc.); which will, in turn, affect the quality of the prediction of the hydrological cycle across several scales, from catchments to regional to global”. In addition to ICTP, UNESCO-IHP, CHRS and G-WADI/ICIWaRM, the workshop was also co-sponsored by the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics.

The program and presentations are available at program and presentations are available at http://indico.ictp.it/event/8685/other-view?view=ictptimetable.