FRIEND AMIGO para América Latina y el Caribe
The FRIEND international meetings have become an excellent scenario for exchanges between experts and regional groups. The 5th FRIEND World Conference in particular, met representatives from all the FRIEND regional groups, as well as the Regional Hydrologists. Besides the exchange propitiated by the scientific presentations, parallel meetings were held, of practically all of the FRIEND regional groups, specialized working groups and IHP regional hydrologists. Before the Conference, professors from the University of Buenos Aires and the University of Havana, delivered a course on Eco-hydrology.
Conference results and scientific contributions
The results of the V FRIEND World Conference demonstrated the strength reached by this project in the following topics:
1. The investigations on low lows, with the objective of analyzing, quantifying, forecasting and evaluating the current and future uncertainties of the water cycle; and evaluating the impacts of drought frequency on water and sectors affected.
2. The studies on large - scale variations, including seasonal river low forecasting, understanding the impact of climate and land-use change on river basin functioning.
3. The new focuses of the analysis of the space distribution of the hydrological processes, by means of interpolation and regionalization.
4. The reduction on the uncertainty of modelling extreme events; including estimating design hydrographs of long return periods from lood frequency simulation, using saturated area mapping to improve the performance of the TOPMODEL and using data on snow extent for improved modelling of snowmelt loods.
5. The investigations on the relationships between runoff generation (including water chemistry) and catchment geology, geomorphology, climate, soils, land use and land management.
These results are consistent with the strategies that Gustard and Bonell (2006) and Servat and Demuth (2006) pointed out for the future of this project.
References
1. Gustard, A. and Bonell, M., 2006. FRIEND: key achievements and opportunities in international co-operation. Climate Variability and Change—Hydrological Impacts (Proceedings of the Fifth FRIEND World Conference, held at Havana, Cuba, November 2006), IAHS Publ. 308.
2. Rodda, J. 2001. Flow regimes from International Experimental and Network Data (FRIEND). An Independent Review for DFID of the UNESCO/IHP FRIEND Programme.
3. Servat, E. and Demuth, S. 2006. FRIEND – a global perspective 2002-2006. IHP German National Committee.