About the project

• Funding: European Union (H2020)
• Coordinator: Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, The Netherlands
• Partners: 23 European organizations
• Duration: 2015-2019
• Website: cordis.europa.eu
• Contact:  Maria-Helena Ramos

IMPREX is an EU Research and Innovation project funded under the Horizon 2020 program.

IMPREX is based on the philosophy that understanding present-day risks is an effective starting point for adapting to unprecedented future events. Taking into account potential climate trajectories and a collection of experiences in various vulnerable water-related sectors, IMPREX will put current management decisions and practices in the context of an emergent future. In addition, the way in which current operational forecasts of potentially high-impact events at various time scales are utilized can still be improved, not only by enhancing the forecasting skill, but also by customizing the information to the stakeholders’ needs, practice and decision context.

Different decisions are taken at different time scales. Hydrological extremes at short-to-medium time scales may trigger an emergency response, but an expected systematic change in the occurrence frequency of these events is what will guide long-term decisions on, for instance, infrastructure design or financial arrangements.

For a better anticipation on future high impact hydrological extremes disrupting safety of citizens, agricultural production, transportation, energy production and urban water supply, and overall economic productivity, prediction and foresighting capabilities and their intake in these strategic sectors need to be improved. IMPREX uses current operational hydro-meteorological forecasting systems at short-to-medium and seasonal range coupled to core sectoral applications of different water resource management organisations as a starting point. Improvements to these forecasting systems are expected to have an immediate impact on the daily practice of water management.

The core elements of IMPREX consist of three interconnected science- and user-oriented actions:

• improvement in the forecasting and foresighting tools and climatologies of hydrological extremes,
• application of these developments in the daily practice of stakeholders across different sectors and regions,
• dissemination of the experience gained from the sectoral impact analyses to a wider audience by means of user-friendly assessment summaries of impact and adaptation strategies, periodic risk outlooks and bulletins for public communication.

Role of IRSTEA: IRSTEA (Antony) is the leader of the work-package ‘Hydropower’, where four European partners will study the impact of a better forecasting of hydrological extremes on hydroelectricity production. Four pilot sites in Europe (Italy, France, Spain and Sweden) compose this work-package. In France, IRSTEA will work in collaboration with EDF (DTG) Grenoble. We will investigate a decision model based on a heuristic optimisation of energy production to provide insights on how economic gains may vary according to input variability and reservoir operation constraints. In IMPREX, IRSTEA also contributes to the work-package “Improved predictability of hydrological extremes”, led by ECMWF, the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasting.