This article describes the HYMOD-KZ database, available at https://shiny.vuv.cz/HYMOD-KZ/. The database provides detailed results of hydrological modelling and hydrological balance analysis of catchments (water bodies) for current and future climate conditions; it also includes updated deficit areas, the description of which is part of this article. This tool can serve as a foundation for water management ex-perts, academia, and the broader professional community as it provides outputs at the spatial resolution of water bodies. The graphical rep-resentation of results facilitates understanding of complex hydrological phenomena and supports decision-making in water management planning.
In December 2020, the new EU Directive 2020/2184 on the quality of water intended for human consumption was published. This Directive places a strong emphasis on comprehensive protection of water resources and introduces an obligation to carry out risk assessment and risk management of the catchment areas for abstraction points of water intended for human consumption, compared to the previous Directive from 1998. The risk analysis of the catchment areas must be carried out for all water abstractions for drinking purposes that abstract more than 10 m3 raw water per day. In the Czech Republic, this concerns approximately 3,650 abstractions (of which about 3,500 are groundwater abstractions and about 150 surface water abstractions). On a nationwide scale, it is therefore a considerable amount of risk analyses of parts of the catchment areas, which, according to the Directive, must be performed by 2027. The main aim of the project “Tools for risk assess-ment of catchment areas for abstraction points of water intended for human consumption” (supported by the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic) is to develop a methodology for the preparation of this risk analysis of the catchment areas. In order to ensure that the risk analyses of the catchment areas to be prepared by different entities have a uniform form and structure, a form (mock-up) of what the risk analyses of the catchment areas should look like and what they should contain has been developed within the framework of the methodology. As this is a very complex issue, only the main skeleton of the methodology will be presented in this article, focusing on the basic characteristics of the abstraction and the definition of the area (the catchment areas) in which the risk activities for the quality of the abstracted raw water are determined.
This year, the Slovak Republic is chairing the largest commission focused on the protection of watercourses, the International Commis-sion for the Protection of the Danube River (ICPDR). Therefore, we interviewed its president for the Year 2024, Ing. Vladimír Novák, who is also the General Director of the Directorate of Water Policy at the Slovak Ministry of Environment.