Modeling Water Availability: Scaling Issues

This report is the outcome of the workshop “Modeling water availability: Scaling issues” which took place on 25 November 1999 within the framework of the international conference “Understanding the Earth System: Compartments, Processes and Interactions”, held in Bonn, Germany. Under chairmanship of Luis J. Mata, five presentations were given by scientists with different disciplinary backgrounds highlighting various aspects of water availability: Jorge A. Ramirez, Hydrologist, Associate Professor of Civil Engineering, gave a three part presentation where issues of scale and dimensionality in geophysics were explored and highlighted. Two applications related to 1) the estimation of large scale water balances for the United States and 2) to the modeling of the continental scale dynamics of drought and soil moisture were presented which illustrate the complicating issues of scale and dimensionality in the modeling and prediction of the distribution of water availability.