Modelling Water Science for Impact
Humanity is facing unprecedented water-related challenges towards future sustain-able development. These challenges range from droughts, to floods, tsunami, water crises, and extreme precipitation. To cope with these challenges, scientists have been developing modelling tools to study many aspects of water (e.g. quantity, quality, management) in order to gain a better understanding of its physical mechanisms, identify current existing gaps, as well as design more effective water management policies. With emerging theories, improved datasets and accelerated computational power, water modelling has propelled tremendous progress in the past few decades. But how can we leverage the advances in these modelling tools across disciplines to have impacts beyond their own field? One potential solution (but certainly not the only one) is through applying integrated frameworks given the integrative nature of the above-mentioned water-related challenges.
This collection aims to present inspiring examples of water modelling research and highlight its role in addressing pertinent environmental challenges. It includes five papers that address key themes such as tsunami hazards, sustainable drinking water, saltwater intrusion, extreme precipitation, and water logging. Although these papers span a wide range of topics, focus on different spatial and temporal scales and utilize different types of modelling tools (theory-based, data-driven, or a combination), they share commonalities in terms of how to leverage modelling advances towards more useful assessments of water-related sustainable development goals as well as more effective disaster risk reduction and management.