Climate Variability and Change—Hydrological Impacts (Proceedings of the Fifth FRIEND World
Conference held at Havana, Cuba, November 2006), IAHS Publ. 308, 2006, 10–16.
Human impacts, complexity, variability and non-homogeneity:
four dilemmas for the water resources modeller
TREVOR M. DANIELL1 & KATHERINE A. DANIELL2
1 School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of
Adelaide, Cooperative Research Centre e-Water, North Terrace, Adelaide 5005,
Australia
trevord@civeng.adelaide.edu.au
2 CEMAGREF/ENGREF, UMR G-EAU, France and Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies (CRES), Australian National University / CSIRO (CMIT), Australia
Abstract Water modellers are commonly faced with a range of dilemmas due to the
complex, uncertain and conflicting nature of the problems currently studied.
The limitations of present techniques to deal with the variability and
non-homogeneity of future data sets in complex water systems are examined. The
main limitations are in part due to changing human behaviour and linked
anthropogenic land- and water-use impacts, as well as the uncertainty of
climatic variability. Suggestions and questions for future practice are raised,
as are technical based methods which are more likely to provide successful
outcomes for integrated river basin management.
Key words water resources; variability;
complexity; resilience; non-homogeneity; human impacts; modelling; ANN;
Australia