Water resources management and planning are among the biggest challenges faced by many countries around the world, including Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) countries. Most countries in the LAC region present these common challenges: 

• Evaluation, protection, management, and quality of water sources
• Lack of quantitative data
• Need to plan under changing conditions
• Design, rehabilitation, maintenance of infrastructures
• Water resources allocation
• Flood and drought risk management

To help our region overcome these challenges we created Hydro-BID:

An integrated and quantitative system to simulate hydrology and water resources management in the LAC region, under scenarios of change (e.g., climate, land use, population) which allows to evaluate the quantity and quality of water, infrastructure needs, and the design of strategies and adaptive projects in response to these changes.

The Hydro-BID system currently includes:
 

• An Analytical Hydrography Dataset (AHD) representing over 230,000 catchments in the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region and their corresponding topography, river and stream segments;
• A GIS-based navigation tool to browse AHD catchments and streams with the capability of navigating upstream and downstream;
• A user interface for specifying the area and time period to be modeled and the location at which water availability will be modeled;
• A climate data interface to obtain rainfall and temperature inputs for the area and period of interest;
• A rainfall-run-off model based on the Generalized Watershed Loading Factor formulation;
• A routing scheme for quantifying time of travel and cumulative flow estimates across downstream catchments.

Why Hydro-BID?
 

• Covers the entire Latin America and Caribbean region: useful to organize and aggregate scarce data
• Spatial and temporal resolution suited for planning and design of water resources infrastructure
• Simulates basin hydrology driven by climate in a modular, flexible and scalable way; robust hydrologic model formulation that is able to interact with just about any type of climate model or data source
• Tailored to simulate water resources at all time-scales: near term, intra/inter-annual, decadal and beyond
• Developed using web-based architecture: runs from a browser-like (app) interface
• Open-source: designed to be community-driven, opening the doors to a rich development and improvement process