The protection of Europe’s precious freshwater resources and the implementation of measures that promote their sustainable use are complex tasks that demand improvements in our scientific understanding of the fundamental hydrological processes that act at the catchments scale. At such large scales there is not yet a modelling approach that unifies, in a rigorous physically based sense, the stream channel, land surface, soil, and groundwater components of the hydrologic cycle. Developing, implementing, and testing such a unifying and integrative framework is the focus of the research being proposed. The framework builds upon previous Directives related to Community water policy, that require integrated management of surface water and groundwater in terms of quality and quantity through Management Plans covering the whole of a river basin. On the technological level, the DAUFIN project addresses two of the most important challenges in hydrology and water resources management, namely (i) how to use and incorporate various types of data, including in-site measurements and remote sensing, into models in order to improve our understanding of the hydrological cycle at various scales and to make water resources management more efficient; (ii) the need for a general purpose physically based modelling framework applicable to catchments across various scales and capable of treating in a unified way channel, surface, and subsurface (saturated and unsaturated zone) processes. The project represents a first large scale attempt on truly European river basins to integrate commonly available data sources, using predominantly existing data sets, within an rigorous systems approach for the study of hydrological processes.
