First results of the AquiFR project- assessment of the french national multimodel hydrogeologic system on past years

The AquiFR project aims at taking benefits of existing groundwater modeling applications used by stakeholders to develop new products in order to provide useful information for water resources management. Indeed, it aims at providing forecasts of the groundwater resources at10 days ahead upto seasonal scale. In its present form, the AquiFR system includes 3 hydrogeological models covering 8 multilayers sedimentary aquifers and 10 karstic aquifers. These applications were assembled within a coupling system facilitating the parallel computation and coupled to a land surface model used in the French numerical weather model that provides the recharge. The whole system is expected to run operationally at Meteo France. To do so, a real time application will be run daily forced by an analysis of the observed atmospheric conditions. This real time simulation will then be able to provide initial conditions for the forecasts. Ensemble 10-day forecast will then be run daily, and seasonal forecasts will be run monthly. The monitoring and the forecasts could be compared to the long term reanalysis of the groundwater that is being built by using an atmospheric reanalysis.