The drought-alert decision support system for water resources management

In this paper, we discuss the drought-alert decision support system (DA-DSS), a solution developed by the Small Medium Enterprise Amigo s.r. l., (Rome, Italy) and MaP Ltd., (Athens, Greece). within the Horizon 2020 cross-sectoral project "cross-climate". DA-DSS is a prototype of the WebGIS application aimed to support the water utilities (WUs) in the management of drinking water in a changing climate. DA-DSS combines climate data, infrastructures geospatial data, and visualization tools. Climate data exploit the seasonal forecasts provided by the EU Copernicus services in order to obtain short and mid-term DA, up to a six months' time range. This information is integrated with geospatial data with advanced geographic information system technology, and finally implemented into a WebGIS application. Two small and medium WUs, located in Greece and Italy respectively, served as test cases for the system development in a co-design approach, based on their existing decision chains. The prototype system was then released in the municipality of Zakynthos, Greece. The investigation of the user's needs suggested that both the WUs are interested in predictions on 3 months-cumulated precipitation, 3 months in advance, from November to March. The test of the prototype in November 2017 demonstrated that the uncertainty, assessed in terms of false rate, is low for the short-term prediction (3 months).