SAFER MESH
Sustainable mAnagement oF watEr Resources: ModEls and numerical MetHods
Sustainable mAnagement oF watEr Resources: ModEls and numerical MetHods
In the broad context of sustainable management of water resources, a significant role is played by the amount of water needed for irrigation in agriculture. Currently, agriculture accounts (on average) for 70 percent of all freshwater withdrawals globally. This means that a wise management of water for irrigation can significantly affect water availability in scarce-water environments, such as Mediterranean regions.
Excessive water withdrawal for irrigation can cause significant problems, such as saline intrusion in coastal aquifers and a deterioration of soils.
Dynamic agro-hydrological models are increasingly used to interpret and solve agro-environmental problems. These models describe the flow of water in unsaturated porous media due to both gravity and capillarity, and they consist of systems of time-dependent, highly nonlinear partial differential equations. Although the first reasonably complete numerical solution method was published in the early 1990s, solving these equations remains computationally expensive and, in certain circumstances, unreliable.
The aim of this project is to advance the state of the art in numerical approximation methods for agro-hydrological models and develop software tools within an integrated framework.
Acronym: SAFER MESH
Principal Investigator (PI): Giuseppe Vacca
Project Period: January 1, 2024 – January 31, 2025
Partnership: IRSA-CNR, Università degli Studi della Basilicata
Funded by: MUR PRIN 2022 PNRR, project code P2022M7JZW
Funding : € 202,979.00