{"id":143719,"date":"2014-01-31T15:39:18","date_gmt":"2014-01-31T17:39:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=143719"},"modified":"2014-01-31T15:39:18","modified_gmt":"2014-01-31T17:39:18","slug":"predicting-impact","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/predicting-impact\/","title":{"rendered":"Predicting the impact"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Overhead

RICARDO AZOURY\/OLHAR IMAGEM<\/span>Overhead view of the Guandu River in the city of Pira\u00ed, state of Rio de Janeiro: a hydrological model guides decisions about water and land use.RICARDO AZOURY\/OLHAR IMAGEM<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Samuel Beskow, researcher and professor at the Federal University of Pelotas (UFPel) in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, has designed a computational model than can simulate the behavior of Brazil’s watersheds (also called drainage basins) and how they are affected by changes in land use. \u201cThe software provides supporting information for certain decisions, such as permission to use a river’s water for irrigation, the suitability of changes in land use, or reservoir establishment potential,\u201d says Beskow, who has an undergraduate degree in agricultural engineering. Beskow developed the model \u2014 called the Lavras Simulation of Hydrology (Lash) \u2014 during his doctoral studies in hydrology and hydrological simulation at the Federal University of Lavras (Ufla), in the state of Minas Gerais, and at Purdue University in the United States. \u201cThe program enables users to outline irrigation, electricity generation, and navigation scenarios. It can even provide hydrological information to support the design of hydraulic projects, such as storm drains, channels, bridges, and dams,\u201d says Beskow, who developed the project in partnership with researchers from three universities: Tocantins, Lavras, and Purdue.<\/p>\n

The models currently used in Brazil are imported from the United States and Europe, which could result in limitations, according to the researcher. \u201cBecause of the climate and soil, among other characteristics, Brazil’s watersheds and their hydrological regimes can be considerably different from European and American ones,\u201d says Beskow. Water resource monitoring in Brazil has been implemented mainly for drainage basins that are intensively used for hydroelectric power, irrigation, or urban supply purposes, and the available gauging data \u2014 including river water levels and flow rate measurements \u2014 are still insufficient to meet the country’s economic and environmental needs. \u201cThe major rivers are monitored, but there are countless smaller basins in agricultural areas where analysis is scarce,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Beskow’s Lash software was the 34th<\/sup> Bunge Foundation Award 2013 “Youth” category winner for the theme “Water resources and agriculture”. \u201cThe model is very important because it can be applied both to small watersheds and large ones,\u201d says Jos\u00e9 Galizia Tundisi, professor emeritus from the University of S\u00e3o Paulo (USP), a graduate program advisor at the Federal University of S\u00e3o Carlos (UFSCar), and head of the global program for training water resource managers, offered by the Interacademy Panel (IAP). \u201cIt is a very advanced management tool,\u201d says Tundisi, who is currently the municipal secretary for Sustainable Development, Science and Technology in the city of S\u00e3o Carlos, inland S\u00e3o Paulo State.<\/p>\n

Independent analysis
\n<\/b>The first version of Lash was completed in 2009, and the software is being used in rainfall and flow rate modeling research on Rio Grande Watershed sub-basins with hydroelectric generating potential. The Rio Grande Watershed drains the states of S\u00e3o Paulo and Minas Gerais. The program’s second version has been in development since 2011 and is now almost complete. The hydrological model has been enhanced for use by companies, watershed committees, water resource user associations, and the pertinent government institutions.<\/p>\n

The program is divided into modules consisting of maps \u2014 which are managed in geographic information systems that characterize each watershed \u2014 and databases with meteorological information like temperature, wind speed, precipitation, soil type, and land use. Users can import and store data from different monitoring stations. \u201cAn interesting aspect is that each basin is divided into sub-basins, resulting in independent analyses of water budgets.\u201d The model will also enable analyses on erosion and sediment transport along watercourses. \u201cBy cross-checking the data, we were able to analyze the susceptibility of a given basin to drought and flooding, rainfall events, and their effects, at intervals of hours or days,\u201d says Beskow, who manages both the Hydrological Simulation and Data Processing Laboratory and the Water Resources graduate program at UFPel.<\/p>\n

Lash enables users to identify the behavior of a watercourse and predict the volume of water that will be available during the dry or rainy seasons. \u201cIn addition to generating information, the model is an instrument that can be used in technical and economic feasibility studies for projects that require use of water resources from rivers.\u201d Tundisi believes that Lash is an innovation from the research standpoint and as a management tool. \u201cThe program’s innovations include the drainage geoprocessing platform, for instance, which involves critical areas in the watersheds, not to mention the fact that it can be used for different regions of Brazil.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scientific articles<\/em>
\nBESKOW, S., MELLO, C.R., NORTON, L.D., SILVA, A.M. Performance of a distributed semi-conceptual hydrological model under tropical watershed conditions<\/a>. Catena<\/b>. v. 86, n. 3, p. 160-71, 2011.
\nBESKOW, S.; NORTON, L.D.; MELLO, C.R. Hydrological prediction in a tropical watershed dominated by Oxisols using a distributed Hydrological model<\/a>. Water Resources Management<\/b>. v. 27, n. 2, p. 341-63. 2013.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Software evaluates future scenarios for electricity generation","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[169],"tags":[200],"coauthors":[115],"class_list":["post-143719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-environment"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143719"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143719\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143719"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=143719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}