HYdrological Modelling for Assessing Climate Change Impacts at differeNT Scales (HYACINTS) will develop new methodologies and tools to enable easier and more accurate use of regional scale climate and hydrological models to address local scale water resources problems.

A new fully dynamic coupling exploiting OpenMI technology will be established between the climate model code HIRHAM and the distributed physically based hydrological model code MIKE SHE . Based on the coupled model system, an integrated climate-hydrological model for the entire Denmark will be established by combining the regional climate model HIRHAM and the national hydrological model (DK model ). As part of the coupling a statistical downscaling and bias-correction method will be developed for conversion of data from large (25 km) climate grids to small (e.g. 1 km) hydrological grids. Remote sensing data and techniques will be utilised and further developed with respect to assessing and downscaling of global precipitation datasets in mountainous areas where precipitation is controlled by orographic effects. In order to facilitate downscaling of hydrological models from regional models (e.g. the existing DK model) to local scale models with more detailed geological and topographical resolution, improved grid refinement methods based on the local model builder concept will be developed. Furthermore, improved methods will be developed for handling complex geological environments when changing model scale. The total uncertainty in hydrological change predictions taking all sources of uncertainty into account will be assessed and an improved methodology for assessing the effects of geological uncertainty will be developed.

HYACINTS started 1 January 2008 and will run for five years. It has 12 partners : two universities, two research institutes, one GTS institute, one SME (small and medium sized enterprise) research and consulting company, one large consulting company, three water companies from the largest cities in Denmark and two Environment Centres.

HYACINTS has obtained additional funding for establishing a research cooperation with an SME on " Development of concepts for digital geological modelling" during 2009 and 2010. The IT/GIS company I-GIS  has been selected as the SME for this research cooperation.