Sustainable Water Resources Research Center(SWRRC)

1. About SWRRC

Our Mission is to develop water management technology that can secure sustainable water resources!

The "Sustainable Water Resources Research Program (SWRRP)", which is one of the 21C Frontier R&D Program sponsored by Korea Ministry of Science and Technology, was launched in 2001 to secure about 3.0 billion m 3 of additional water resources and raise the level of korean technologies up to 80% of that of the advanced countries by 2011.

Since this program was started, the first and second phase had finished for last six years, the SWRRP has four years in its third phase that completes this program.

- The objective of the 1st phase is to develop the element technology and platform technology.

- The objective of the 2nd phase is to construct a framework for integrating and applying the developed technologies in each field.

- The objective of the 3rd phase is to integrate and apply the developed technologies for securing water resources in all fields.

By the end of this program, 3.0 billion m 3 of water resources will be secured through the development and application of technologies for securing water resources. In the 3.0 billion m 3, 280 million m 3 of water resources will be secured and supplied directly through the technologies such as groundwater artificial recharge, wastewater reuse for agriculture, the hydrologic cycle improvement. The other 2.92 billion m 3 will be secured indirectly through improving water resources planning system, the efficiency of dam operation, surface water and groundwater management and leakage water management of water supply, etc.

SWRRC will develop the technologies for measuring, planning, operating of surface water resources, groundwater resources, alternative water resources. Especially, the technologies such as the river flow modeling and the groundwater flow modeling will keep the run of the advanced countries by introducing their key softwares into the global market.

2. SWRRC in AsemWaterNet

Workpackage 1 : BASIN(Promote river-basin approaches in water management)

Theme 1. Water resources management under extreme drought conditions

In Korea, the national water resources planning is based on a relatively short period such as thirty years which has been recommended by WMO to calculate the mean annual precipitation of a station. However, the annual precipitation of Republic of Korea is varied with large range and the trend of variation is different by the period. In other words, the mean annual precipitation and the standard deviation of annual precipitation are different by the computation period. Therefore, it is required that we analyze effects of variations of the annual precipitation on the assessment of water supply reliability to secure sustainable developments.

Theme 2. Water related knowledge management system

The main water issue that we are facing today could be identified to find an efficient management satisfying the need of human and environment simultaneously. The best way to overcome the crisis in water management is to use water more efficiently through the development of water management technology in Korea. The Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) is considered as an alternative to meet this need. To implement the IWRM efficiently, a target oriented approach for coexistence of human beings and ecosystems is needed. To realize this purpose, various tools must be developed in an Integrated Water Resources Management System (IWRMS). These tools could be integrated by an Integrated Modeling Framework (IMF) to simulate the composite phenomenon of river basin constraining ecological, cultural, and social conditions. It also needs the development of the Water Resources Knowledge Management System (WRKMS) to provide various information and knowledge in decision making processes and system configurations.