Teodoro Estrela

Universitat Politècnica de València | UPV · Department of Hydraulic Engineering and Environment

Water scarcity will increase in the world in the coming decades due to climate change, especially in areas that currently already have water scarcity, such as the Mediterranean area. In these areas, to guarantee water resources, systems’ sustainability is necessary to improve demand management and the development of non-conventional resources, such...

Aquifers are ubiquitous, and their water is easy to obtain with low extraction costs. On many occasions, these characteristics lead to overexploitation due to important water level declines, reduction of river base flows, enhanced seawater intrusion, and wetland affection. The forecasted increase in water demands and global warming will impact the...

The European Water Framework Directive (WFD) mandates to incorporate the participation of stakeholders and the general public in the development and updating of the river basin management plans. So far, the WFD implementation has been mainly focused on perennial rivers without considering temporary rivers properly, neither in biomonitoring programs...

The biomonitoring methods implemented by water authorities are mostly developed for perennial rivers, and do not apply to temporary rivers (TRs). We propose a new classification for TRs to better assess their ecological status. It arises from the LIFE+ TRivers project, which was conducted in the Catalan and the Júcar Mediterranean river basin distr...

Simulations of water fluxes at high spatial resolution that consistently cover historical observations, seasonal forecasts, and future climate projections are key to providing climate services aimed at supporting operational and strategic planning, and developing mitigation and adaptation policies. The End-to-end Demonstrator for improved decision-...

p>Se repasa, en el marco del contexto mundial, la evolución de la desalación en España. Una historia de más de medio siglo que arrancó donde el agua más escasea, en las Islas Canarias. Lo que comenzó siendo una solución puntual para resolver problemas concretos ha ido, al compás de los avances tecnológicos, de la reducción de costes y del control d...

This paper proposes an interpolation model for monthly rainfall in large areas of complex orography. It has been implemented in the Iberian Peninsula (continental territories of Spain and Portugal), Balearic and Canary Islands covering a territory of almost 600.000 km². To do this a data set that comprises a total number of 11,822 monthly precipita...

A summary of the evolution of desalination in Spain, spanning over half a century of history, follows. What started as a solution to resolve occasional water shortages in islands where natural surface and ground water resources were scarce, has gained more relevance with technological advancements, less expensive production costs and at the same ti...

Significant changes in the Júcar River Basin District’s hydrology in the Mediterranean side of Spain, have been observed during last decades. A statistical change-point in the year 1980 was detected in the basins’ hydrological series in the main upper river, Júcar and Túria basins. In the study scope are, the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is lin...

Hydropower generation represents an important contribution to meeting the challenges of today's increasing world energy needs. It uses about 44% of water in Europe, and it is the main user of water in most OECD countries. However, in most cases, the energy sector is not a water consumer. The largest part of these withdrawals is immediately returned...

Droughts are one of the gravest natural threats currently existing in the world and their occurrence and intensity might be exacerbated in the coming years due to climate change. The severe impacts that droughts cause to inland water resources and to the associated socio-economic activities justify the continuous monitoring of the drought. The case...

Precipitation is a major concern in water resources studies. Being a main variable, the inefficiency of historical ground network, particularly at higher altitudes where precipitation and runoff augmentations are expected, constitutes a major drawback. This work analyses the competence of Spanish historical precipitation network and explores the ph...

When the regime of a river is not perennial, there are four main difficulties with the use of hydrographs for assessing hydrological alteration: i) the main hydrological features relevant for biological communities are not quantitative (discharges) but qualitative (phases such as flowing water, stagnant pools or lack of surface water), ii) stream f...

Droughts are current challenges to the economic, social and environmental development of a region, as reflected in European Union (EU) water policies. In addition, the impacts of droughts can be aggravated by climate change effects, adding pressure to already water stressed areas in the EU. This paper presents a general overview of drought manageme...

Water planning and the Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) represent the best way to help decision makers to identify and choose the most adequate alternatives among other possible ones. The System of Environmental-Economic Accounting for Water (SEEA-W) is displayed as a tool for the building of water balances in a river basin, providing a...

Water represents an essential element for the life of all who inhabit our planet. But the random nature of this resource, which is manifested by the alternation of wet periods and dry periods, makes it even more precious. Whatever the approach (water planning, water management, drought, economy), in order to maximise the profit produced by the allo...

The paper presents how to solve some practical problems of water planning in a medium/large river basin, such as: the water resources assessment and its spatial-temporal variability over the long-short term, the impact of human activities on the water cycle, due to groundwater pumping and water returns into aquifers, the river-aquifer interactions...

One of the major difficulties in water planning is to determine the water availability in a water resource system in order to distribute water sustainably. In this paper, we analyze the key issues for determining the exploitable water resources as an indicator of water availability in a Mediterranean river basin. Historically, these territories are...

Currently, water accounts are one of the next steps to be implemented in European River Basin Management Plans. One of the major handicaps lies on computing water resources availability as it depends on several factors, some of which are difficult to quantify. Building water accounts is a complex task, mainly due to the lack of common European defi...

Surface runoff is the water that flows after soil is infiltrated to full capacity and excess water from rain, meltwater, or other sources flows over the land. When the soil is saturated and the depression storage filled, and rain continues to fall, the rainfall will immediately produce surface runoff. The Soil Conservation Service Curve Number (SCS...

This paper describes two different GIS models - one stationary (GeoImpress) and the other non-stationary (Patrical) - that assess water quantity and quality in the Júcar River Basin District, a large river basin district (43,000km(2)) located in Spain. It aims to analyze the status of surface water (SW) and groundwater (GW) bodies in relation to th...

Impacts on water resources produced by climate change can be exacerbated when occurring in regions already presenting low water resources levels and frequent droughts, and subject to imbalances between water demands and available resources. Within Europe, according to existing climate change scenarios, water resources will be severely affected in S...

Water is a strategic resource for the economic, social and environmental development. However, water scarcity and droughts are current challenges to this growth, as it is reflected in European Union (EU) water policies, and in national and regional growing initiatives. In addition, these water related issues could worsen by climate change effects,...

The European Water Framework Directive (WFD) 2000/60/EC, establishes a framework for Community action in the field of water policy, introducing a new perspective from a modern view of water policy to all Member States of the European Union, with important consequences for the future water management. This paper reviews the status of the implementat...

Water resources are strategic for economic, social and environmental development, but water scarcity and droughts are current challenges that could be worsened by climate change.

In this study a first approach is presented for the establishment of the reference conditions and the ecological classes in surface water bodies of Júcar River Basin. The results show 27% of rivers with pristine conditions and 64% without or slightly altered conditions. In these water reaches the data of biological monitoring network have been used...

Currently, most of the research focused on general pedotransfer functions (PTFs) has been generated under humid climatic conditions. Nevertheless, this article proposes an estimation of pedotransfer functions for a great variety of climatic and physiographic conditions, with a predominance of soils developed under semi-arid conditions, such as thos...

A methodology for the regionalisation and the identification of droughts at a pan European scale is described in this paper. It includes part of the activities carried out by CEDEX in the framework of the EC funded project entitled Assessment of the Regional Impact of Droughts in Europe ARIDE (Demuth and Stahl, Authors, 2001). The proposed methodol...

this report do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of the European Communities or other European Communities institutions. Neither the European Environment Agency nor any person or company acting on the behalf of the Agency is responsible for the use that may be made of the information contained in this report. A great deal of information...

this report. A great deal of additional information on the European Union is available on the Internet. It can be accessed through the Europa server (http://europa.eu.int). EEA, Copenhagen, 2001 Reproduction is authorised provided the source is acknowledged

Droughts have been defined as phenomena characterised by an unusual temporary scarcity of water in a region. This work is focussed on studying the occurrence of drought events at European scale through a previous regionalization. It has been developed for ARIDE (Assessment of the Regional Impact of Droughts in Europe) project funded by EC (Environm...

Alvarez, J. and Estrela, T. (2001). Large scale droughts in Europe. In S. Demuth and K. Stahl, editors, Assessment of Regional Impact of Droughts in Europe. Final report to the European Union ENV-CT97-00553, pages 83{93. Institute of Hydrology, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany. 154pp.

The aim of this study is to analyse the occurrence of drought events at Europe scale through a previous regionalization. Droughts have been defined as natural phenomena characterised by an unusual temporary scarcity of water in a region. Spatial and temporal basis have an influence in defined droughts. So, an effort has been made to characterise dr...

En el presente artículo se describe brevemente el modelo hidrológico distribuido utilizado en el Libro Blanco del Agua en España para la evaluación de los recursos hídricos en régimen natural. Se tiene la intención de presentar en sucesivos números de esta Revista otros instrumentos o procedimientos específicamente desarrollados para el Libro Blanc...

El número de curva es uno de los parámetros más utilizados en España para estimar la infiltración en el suelo a partir de la precipitación. Uno de los problemas que presenta su estimación es que la información que para ésta se precisa no está en muchos casos actualizada. Para resolver este problema, en el presente artículo se propone utilizar la te...

The aim of the study that is presented, is to make the most of the applicability of both Thornthwaite's Method and the Penmann - Monteith Method. The former only requires knowledge of a small number of variables, latitude and average temperatures, which are easy to calculate and process in geographical information layers. The latter, is a more reli...

A linear response model based on daily spring discharges has been applied in simulating the response of the karstic aquifer feeding the Arteta spring in Navarra (Spain), which is used for the water supply of the city of Pamplona. The model is derived from the eigenvalue solution of the ground-water flow partial differential equation, a method that...

A methodology is presented that has been developed by the Centro de Estudios Hidrogrâficos of CEDEX, which automatically derives the river network yield maps from runoff maps and a digital terrain model in an opera­ tional way, without it being necessary to plot the watersheds of the basins. The proposed methodology has been applied throughout the...

En este estudio se propone una metodología para la obtención de una manera automática del número de curva, parámetro hidrológico que utiliza el método del Servicio de Conservación de Suelos (SCS) de los EEUU para el cálculo de la escorrentía. La metodología propuesta está basada en la utilización de los Sistemas de Información Geográfica (SIG), los...

Many areas along the Mediterranean coast of Spain have developed intensive agricultural land use which involves a large- scale use of water resources and which has increased in seawater intrusion. Study of alternative management policies to improve water use must include a management model involving two simulation submodels: one for surface water r...

– During the past recent years, Spain has suffered a significant dry season, which still persists nowadays. Drought events occur frequently, seriously impacting the environment and water availability, causing important socio-economic impacts. These situations highlight the need of a planned and integrated management of water resources, in order to...