Giuseppe Rossi - Böcker

Droughts and their management are a serious challenge to water resource professionals. While droughts predominate in arid regions, their frequency and severity in more temperate regions with more abundant rainfall have been on the rise. Drought Management and Planning for Water Resources provides an essential collection of planning and management tools for minimizing the negative impacts of droughts. Comprehensive and up-to-date, it covers water conservation and reuse, conjunctive use and use of marginal resources, desalination, deep groundwater extraction, optimization modeling, and decision support systems.With contributions from a prestigious international panel, the book presents best management practices that maximize efficiency, reliability, and economy while minimizing the potential for adverse effects to the environment and human health. Providing appropriate methodologies, the chapters discuss how conjunctive water use can increase water availability in the developing world and what types of conjunctive use schemes are the most promising. The book examines the feasibility of a drought watch alert system and the legal and administrative framework required. It also explores the application of the Optimization Models and the Decision Support Systems to the study of different water management alternatives under drought conditions. Drought Management and Planning for Water Resources delineates how to reduce drought effects through pro-active vision, good management, and conjunctive use of water sources.

Floods are natural hazards whose effects can deeply affect the economic and environmental equilibria of a region. Quality of life of people living in areas close to rivers depends on both the risk that a flood would occur and the reliability of flood forecast, warning and control systems. Tools for forecasting and mitigating floods have been developed through recent research. Two innovations currently influence flood hazard mitigation, after many decades of lack of significant progress. They are the development of new technologies for real-time flood forecast and warning (based on weather radars and satellites) and a shift from structural to non-structural flood control measures, due to increased awareness of the importance of protecting the environment and the adverse impacts of hydraulic works on it. This book is a review of research progress in the improvements of forecast capability and the control of floods. It presents the results of recent research in hydrology, modern techniques of real-time forecast and warning, and ways of controlling floods for smaller impacts on the environment. A number of case studies of floods in different geographical areas are also presented.Scientists and specialists working in fields of hydrology, environmental protection and hydraulic engineering should appreciate this book for its theoretical and practical content.

The increasing risk of severe droughts and water shortages emphasizes the need for an integrated approach to drought mitigation. However, effective tools for the implementation of such an approach have not been available till now. This book contributes to an improved preparedness for drought in water supply systems, providing tools useful for a better decision making process in drought management. It presents methods and software features of a Decision Support System (DSS) developed within a European research project and consists of three main parts. The first part deals with the advanced techniques for hydrological drought identification and monitoring; the second analyses the successful use of climate-crop-soil models in defining deficit irrigation strategies; the third provides tools for improving the operation of irrigation supply reservoirs. All methods are embedded in a user-friendly DSS package that has been applied in several Case Studies of Mediterranean countries (Portugal, Italy, Tunisia, Jordan and Syria) and whose results are also compared.

Implementation of effective drought management policies requires both advanced technologies and appropriate methods. Monitoring and forecasting systems, practical tools for risk assessment, as well as simple and objective criteria to select and implement appropriate drought mitigation measures are key elements for a successful drought management strategy.These key issues have been tackled by universities and public agencies involved in the EU projects Sedemed and Sedemed II (Programme Interreg IIIB MEDOCC), aimed at the definition of an integrated network for real time monitoring of drought, the development of common methodologies for drought analysis and forecasting, as well as the definition of proper mitigation strategies for the Mediterranean countries. The book presents the main outcomes of such projects with a special focus on: drought monitoring and forecasting techniques at different spatial scales; new or modified agrometeorological indices and remote sensing technique for drought identification and characterization; tools to improve surface water resources management under drought conditions; methods and tools for groundwater resources monitoring and management, based on hydrogeological and hydrodynamics characteristics of aquifers; general criteria to select and implement mitigation strategies to prevent or minimize drought impacts.

This book offers a comprehensive framework of the current state of water resources in Italy and of the main stages of the evolutionary way in the last decades for achieving an integrated, sustainable and equitable water resources management.

This book offers a comprehensive framework of the current state of water resources in Italy and of the main stages of the evolutionary way in the last decades for achieving an integrated, sustainable and equitable water resources management.

Despite their inherent seriousness, the law and those who practice it, be it lawyers, judges, politicians, or bureaucrats, are amongst the most popular objects of comedy and humour. Sometimes even the mention of the law, or the mere use of legal vocabulary, can trigger laughter. This is deeply counterintuitive, but true across cultures and historical eras: while the law is there to prevent and remedy injustice, it often ends up becoming the butt of comedy. But laughter and comedy, too, are also infused with seriousness: as universal social phenomena, they are extremely complex objects of study. This book maps out the many intersections of the law and laughter, from classical Greece to the present day. Taking on well-known classical and modern works of literature and visual culture, from Aristophanes to Laurel and Hardy and from Nietzsche to Totò and Fernandel, laughter and comedy bring law back to the complexity of human soul and the unpredictability of life.

Implementation of effective drought management policies requires both advanced technologies and appropriate methods. Monitoring and forecasting systems, practical tools for risk assessment, as well as simple and objective criteria to select and implement appropriate drought mitigation measures are key elements for a successful drought management strategy.These key issues have been tackled by universities and public agencies involved in the EU projects Sedemed and Sedemed II (Programme Interreg IIIB MEDOCC), aimed at the definition of an integrated network for real time monitoring of drought, the development of common methodologies for drought analysis and forecasting, as well as the definition of proper mitigation strategies for the Mediterranean countries. The book presents the main outcomes of such projects with a special focus on: drought monitoring and forecasting techniques at different spatial scales; new or modified agrometeorological indices and remote sensing technique for drought identification and characterization; tools to improve surface water resources management under drought conditions; methods and tools for groundwater resources monitoring and management, based on hydrogeological and hydrodynamics characteristics of aquifers; general criteria to select and implement mitigation strategies to prevent or minimize drought impacts.

Most water systems in the industrial regions of the world are already developed. At the same time they are highly complex. This is true with respect to physical configuration, managment, operation, political goals, environmental interactions, etc. Thus the basic systems are already in place. This realization is the starting point for any new water developments and for operation. From this we conclude that whatever we do to meet new exigencies requires an understanding of the presently in-place complex water systems. Their operation is the important thing. And how can we adjust their operation to meet the new demands upon the system? This book deals with complex water systems and their operation. Some chapters are highly theoretical while others are rooted in practical applications. How can we an~lyze the operation of a complex water system and determine how its performance can be improved? Several chapters on mathematical analysis give approaches involving different aspects of this problem. But operation also has political, management, and physical aspects. These problems are addressed in chapters by managers who operate such systems. The main theme of all chapters is how to deal with the different aspects of a complex water system, already in place. We feel the book, in dealing with this question could be a start for new theoretical premises in water planning.

Significant vulnerability of water systems to drought is a common issue of water resources management in Mediterranean regions. This is due both to the increasing occurrence and severity of drought events and to the growing demand for municipal, tourist, and agricultural uses. The INCO-DC project entitled "A Decision Support System for Mitigation of Drought Impacts in the Mediterranean Regions" (DSS­ DROUGHT) addresses this issue, contributing to an improved management of water­ supply systems for irrigation, which represents the most consumptive sector of water resources uses in the Mediterranean region. In order to develop a comprehensive approach toward improved operation of irrigation systems under drought conditions, the project was developed around the following five main, strictly interconnected tasks: Identification of drought characteristics at a site and over a region Modelling irrigation management under conditions of water scarcity Modelling operation of water supply systems under drought conditions Integration of the developed methodologies within a Decision Support System software package Definition of requisites for Drought Watch Systems The research resulted in an advancement of knowledge through in-depth analysis of innovative methodologies, the development of tools to help decision-makers in coping with droughts through the implementation of the developed procedures in software packages, and the application of these tools to the case-studies identified by partners in their countries.