GEOframe: A first attempt of regionalization on Sicilian basins

Abstract

The necessity to quantify and manage available water resources has become a common priority in recent years, especially in light of the increasing occurrence and severity of phenomena such as dry spells, driven in part by climate change and human activities, which are significantly impacting socio-economic life. Several cases worldwide have shown that these climatological events can occur repeatedly, even in the same regions but at different times of the year. This study focuses on Sicily (Italy), the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, which has been particularly affected by dry spells in recent years. One of the main challenges in managing water resources in Sicilian basins is due to a sparse flow monitoring network; not all basins have sufficient stream gauging stations, and not always data are consistently recorded. Additionally, river flow rates are often outdated. In such a context, it is crucial to have a modelling framework capable to correctly deal with those basins where observed flow data are unavailable, making the hydrological model calibration impossible. In this study, Sicilian basins with available flow data have been modelled using the GEOframe system, a framework developed at the University of Trento and widely applied in several hydrological basin studies. The main objective is the regionalization of the hydrological model parameters estimated in gauged basins (see Figure 1) to ungauged basins. This will enable the application of GEOframe across the entire island as a tool to support the management of present and future estimated water resources at different time scales.