On Nov 7-11, the second WUEMoCA User Forum was held in the Uzbek capital Tashkent, attended by a total of 30 participants – among them delegates from the field of irrigation water management of all five Central Asian countries, representatives of international organisations, and CASIB's head of bureau Peter Liebelt.
WUEMoCA stands for "Water Use Efficiency Monitor in Central Asia" and is a major result of the multi-year joint research project "CAWa – Research Network Water in Central Asia", which was funded by the German Federal Foreign Office and came to an end this year. CAWa was part of the Central Asia Water Initiative (the "Berlin Process") and aimed at creating a sound scientific basis for trans-national water resources management in Central Asia. At the core was the installation of up-to-date hydro-meteorological stations equipped with sophisticated sensors that send their data via real-time satellite communication to the operation centre of the monitoring network and to the participating National hydro-meteorological services. Complementing data is gathered through remote sensing, GNSS-based methods, and site-specific individual studies.
On this basis, scientists from the German universities Würzburg and Halle-Wittenberg as well as from Greenspin GmbH Würzburg and IC ICWC Tashkent (Scientific Information Centre of the Interstate Coordination Water Commission) jointly developed WUEMoCA – an operational scientific web-mapping tool for regional monitoring of both land and water use efficiency in the irrigated croplands of the transboundary Aral Sea basin. Satellite data on land use, crop production, and water consumption is integrated with hydrological and economic information to provide a set of data indicators. The tool is highly useful for large-scale decisions on water distribution or land use, and can be consulted for numerous applications in practice that require independent and extensive spatial information.
Within the framework of the user forum, the developers presentend the tool and its background, trained the participants through a hands-on course in its use and detailed precise applications strategies for specific case studies concerning irrigaton water management.
WUEMoCA is freely accessible online under http://wuemoca.net.
Learn more: https://www.cawa-project.net/news-detail/news/second-wuemoca-user-forum…
The event also provided the opportunity for fruitful exchange between CASIB and representatives of the Uzbek Ministry for Innovative Development, with which there are definite plans to sign a joint memorandum in the near future.
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