Storylines
Questions from the region, translated into scenarios and interventions the Digital Twin can explore.
What a storyline is
Water management starts with the right questions. In SLRE they come from the people who deal with water every day: farmers, water authorities, municipalities and regional planners. Co-design is how their knowledge and their priorities shape the science.
A storyline joins two things that are usually kept apart. A scenario describes conditions nobody in the region controls: climate, water demand, land use. An intervention is an option the region can decide on: a retention area, an irrigation rule, a redistribution between reservoirs. Put together they make a question the models can answer, for example: what happens after several dry years, and what does a redistribution between reservoirs change?
Every storyline ends up in the Interactive Solution Room, where the question is explored live with the models and the AI agents instead of being discussed on paper.
Demo storylines
Two example storylines are set up in the demonstrator. The drought example is the more complete of the two; the flood example is newer and its workflow is still being validated. Both exist to be tried, argued with and improved.
Demo Drought v1.0
Drought at the Selhausen site
A 10 by 10 cell window at 100 m around the Selhausen station south of Jülich, daily from 2010 to 2020. Four stages build on each other: atmospheric forcing, the soil water balance over a 210 cm profile (mGROWA, with an LSTM emulator for soil moisture), irrigation and crop yield from LASSO, and the agricultural economics of DroughtMAS.
The demonstration asks how variable plant-available water is during droughts, what a water deficit does to yield, and which adaptation keeps farming viable. Run the baseline, then a drier variant, and compare soil moisture and yield.
Demo Flood v0.0
Flood in the Münstereifel setup
The July 2021 event, with river discharge taken from a longer 2020 to 2021 mHM run and two-dimensional flood modelling in RIM2D. Weather, hydrology and hydraulics pass their results along the chain, and the output is flood depth.
The first variant changes sewer capacity in millimetres per hour and compares maximum flood depth against the baseline. Rainfall perturbation stays out of this first demonstration, and the full chat-to-simulation workflow is still being validated.
Prospective storylines
The two examples above exist to be tried and argued with. The storylines that carry the project are still being made, and they come out of co-design: the people who work with water in the region decide which questions are worth a model run.
The storylines themselves are a result of the workshop syntheses. The first one records what the participants brought to the table. A follow-up workshop narrows the field, until a few storylines are carried by everyone involved.
How a storyline is made
- A workshop group or a bilateral conversation names the question that matters to it.
- The question is sharpened into a scenario and an intervention, and the group checks that this is the question it meant to ask.
- The project works out what the Digital Twin needs to answer it: which models, at what resolution, with which assumptions.
- The storyline runs in the Interactive Solution Room with the people who asked for it, and comes back revised.
How they differ from the demo storylines
The demos are deliberately narrow: one site, one period, one lever, so that the machinery can be tested and trusted. A project storyline starts from a stakeholder question, can bring drought and flood into the same picture, and carries the region's own terms for risk, cost and fairness. It is built to be changed: the question stays, the setting moves with what the group learns.
What they might be about
Two examples of the kind of question we expect. Both are still open.
Who gets the water in a dry summer?
Drinking water supply, industry, agriculture and the reservoirs drawing on the same groundwater body through several dry years. The levers are abstraction rules, irrigation priorities and redistribution between reservoirs.
Drought and flood in the same valley
Reservoir and retention operation that has to hold water for supply in one season and keep room for a flood in the next. The levers are operating rules, retention volume and dike relocation.
Neither is agreed, costed or modelled yet. They show the shape a co-designed storyline takes once the region has picked the question.