TRAINING ON TRANSBOUNDARY WATER BALANCE MODELLING

11-13 December 2024, SOFIA, BULGARIA

Danube Water Balance project partners met for an intense 3-day training in Sofia, Bulgaria hosted by Bulgarian Water Association. The training was aimed to involve the most advanced model experts from the given partner institutions in order to foster their continued engagement and strengthen their ability to transfer knowledge and expertise to other stakeholders.

Trainers from PP4 – International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis demonstrated some examples of how to use ArcGIS to set up the CWatM model and participants were asked to share their works (“homework”) they did in preparation for the meeting.

The first day commenced with an introduction to CWatM modelling system, configuration of the setting file and CWatM modules as a refresher and starting point. Calibration settings and calibration run were also discussed. Partners worked together as a group pre-processing river network corrections with tool explanation followed by a river network correction tutorial.

The second day started with an introduction to crop maps (methodology and datasets), followed by a tutorial on data preparation of crop maps and how to input maps in CWatM. The group practiced how to use crop maps and meteorological maps, discussed methodology and reservoir input in CWatM. The rest of the day was spent CWatM post-processing: water circles and discharge calibration map.

This training represents a significant step towards fostering knowledge and expertise for stakeholders, not only from water management sector, which will contribute to the broad adoption of a common model at Danube basin level.