The CHESS project (Climate Hydrochemistry and Economics of Surface – Water Systems) is a multi-national investigation of how expected changes in climate and land cover will affect the quality of freshwater resources in Europe. Two are the main research parts of the project: the development of an appropriate model framework and the application of the framework for the impact assessment of environmental changes.
– An instream water quality model describing plysical, chemical and ciological processes has been developed and has been validated in the Pinios river, the Greek case study
– A monthly water balance model (WBUDG) has been calibrated and several runs simulated the water balance of the catchment under changed climatic conditions. Scenarios representing future conditions are the UKHI and HadCM2
– A catchment model of vegetation and soil processes named SWAT, has been calibrated for the Greek catchment
Future work includes the investigation of techniques for linking the models to give a complete catchment system representation.