EcoHydro

The project EcoHydro “Eco-Hydrology of alpine watersheds” is an internal basic-research Eurac project which addresses the important problem of improving the knowledge of the water budget in Alpine environments.

The focus is on three strategic hydrological parameters, namely Soil Moisture Content (SMC), Evapotranspiration (ET), and Snow Water Equivalent (SWE). They quantify important aspects of the water cycle, i.e., the water storage in and above the soil and the exchange of water with the atmosphere, thus they have a direct and fundamental implication on many climatic and hydrological applications as well as for agriculture, forestry, and other economic activities. In the Alps, spatial and temporal scales reduce, and all climatic and hydrologic dynamics enhance significantly.
Accurate, reliable, and frequent mapping of SMC, ET, and SWE in this challenging environment thus becomes imperative for a clear understanding of the trends for the next years as well as for building adaptations strategies for water resources management and early response in case of emergency.
To address this challenging problem, the project aims at developing a novel integrated approach centered on modeling, where hydrologic simulations are used in combination with in-situ measurement and the retrieval from Earth Observation (EO) satellite imagery. The focus is on exploiting through eco-hydrological modeling the observations collected in the last years in the LTER Matsch/Mazia, for more accurate quantification of the water budget components in Alpine Catchments.