IWRA Proceedings

AbstractIn this paper, the study of water resources availability for a small Ligurian catchment (located in the north eastern part of Italy next to the French boundary)is discussed. In the basin under study and the ones nearby a series of small hydropower stations are planned to be restored. This renewed interest for hydropower stations can be attributed both to an increasing local demand for electricity, and to the funds recently provided by the Italian government to encourage alternative/suppletive forms of energy. Starting from few measures available (rainfall, runoff and temperature data), the work aims to investigate basin underground storage and make accurate real time daily forecasts with a focus on critical conditions for hydropower reservoirs. For these purposes, a variety of methods have been proposed including physically based, conceptual and empirical models; still none of them can be reputed as the best choice (Shamseldin, 1997). Neverthless, the authors believe that when poorly monitored catchments are discussed, very complex and data demanding models should be discouraged on the basis of the significantly higher predictive uncertainty generally inherent in such models. Herein, meaurements of rainfall (P), air temperature (T) and streamflow discharges (Q) can be obtained easily and at a low cost as compared to others such as soil characteristics, initial soil moisture, rate of infiltration, etc. Therefore a lumped model like IHACRES which uses available real time data would be more easily applied for streamflow daily forecasting task. In addition to this, a conceptual model with one/ two reservoirs gives, through the geomorphological parameters, a reliable estimate of the catchment underground availability.