Partner 13: ACA

The Agència Catalana de l'Aigua (ACA, Catalan Water Agency) is a public organisation attached to the Ministry of the Environment and Housing of the Government of Catalonia, with full authority over the water cycle in the inland basins of Catalonia. The responsibilities of the Catalan Water Agency are to draw up and revise hydrological plans and projects and undertake their monitoring, to grant, administer and control hydro installations, to control the qualitative aspects of water and public water resources in general, and the policing of public water resources.
The Catalan Water Agency uses various control tools for the monitoring of the state of the water and of the environment; it is quality and quantity of the surface waters (rivers, reservoirs), ground waters and the coastal waters. The Remote Control Centre (CTC) receives and manages centrally the data from the automatic control networks: measurements from sensors (rain and climate gauges), alarms associated with these measurements, malfunction signals from field infrastructures, etc. The CTC currently supervises over 200 automatic control stations distributed throughout Catalonia.
the Catalan Water Agency is carrying out programme includes actions of preventative maintenance and improvement of the riverbeds, both from an environmental point of view as well as a hydrological one, in addition to prevention of flooding and emergency actions resulting from one-off situations that require a rapid response from the Agency. In this sense, The ACA has been collaborating with the UPC-CRAHI from the last 5 years to develop and implement a flooding guidance and hydrological warning system. As a result, the EHIMI (Integrated Hydrometeorological Forecasting Tool) is operationally nowadays. The main purpose of the project has been to implement a real-time hydrometeorological forecasting system based on weather radar information. The hydrometeorological data is provided by 3 radars (C-band Doppler radars from the SMC) and about 300 telemetered automatic rainguages (SAIH network), covering approximately 32000 km2 of the Catalan region. EHIMI is composed by several modules and tools oriented, in one hand, to process and analyse 3-D radar data, and in the other hand, to process the conventional hydrological data (raingauges and stage sensors), obtaining an improved rainfall field based on a radar-raingauge merging. A rainfall forecast, followed by the application of a distributed rainfall-runoff model, provides helpful information in order to manage floods in risky situations. The main result of the project will be a new Integrated Warning System (alerts based on rain estimates and discharge predictions) extended to all the most important catchments in the region. More information at http://mediambient.gencat.net/aca/en/inici.jsp

Enrique Velasco. He is Civil Engineer, specialist in Hydrology and Remote Sensing and he is now the Head of the Remote Control Centre (CTC) of the Inspection and Control Unit in the Catalan Water Agency (ACA). He is mainly in charge of the hydrometeorological network of Catalonia (SiCat).

Selected Publications
2007.    Sànchez-Diezma, R., D. Sempere Torres, D. Velasco, D. Forcadell, M. Franco, E. Vilaclara, L. Trapero, T. Rigo, J. Bech, E. Velasco, and F. Ballester, 2007: Development of enhanced quantitative radar precipitation estimates and related hydro-meteorological applications. In: Proceedings of 33rd International Conference on Radar Meteorology, Cairns (Australia), AMS, P2.15.
2007.    Velasco-Forero, C., R. Sánchez-Diezma, A. Andreatta, E. Velasco, and D. Sempere-Torres, 2007: Improvements in the Catalan rain gauge network using a multi-criteria decision analysis. Geophysical Research Abstracts, 9, 10281.
2005.    Bech, J., T. Rigo, N. Pineda, S. Segalà, E. Vilaclara, R. Sànchez-Diezma, D. Sempere-Torres, and E. Velasco, 2005: Implementation of the EHIMI software package in the weather radar operational chain of the catalan meteorological service. In: Proceedings of 32nd Conference on Radar Meteorology, Albuquerque-EUA, AMS, P13R.3.
2004.    Corral, C., D. Sempere-Torres, C. Velasco-Forero, R. Sánchez-Diezma, M. Berenguer, E. Velasco, and J. Pastor, 2004: EHIMI: Herramienta de previsión hidrometeorológica integrada. Experiencia y resultados de la primera fase de implementación en Catalunya. In: Proceedings of Jornadas sobre los sistemas de ayuda a la decisión ante problemas hidráulicos e hidrológicos en tiempo real, Madrid, CEDEX, 279-287.