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A number of Nature Based Solutions (NBS) are being used around the world in order to address various hydrometeorological hazards as a more environmentally friendly alternative to hard structures. Such a solution has been created in the Spercheios river basin in Central Greece, which is susceptible to heavy rainfall and river bank overflow due to flood water from upstream, in order to mitigate flood and drought impacts under current and future climate conditions. Here a first attempt is made to use actual measurements taken from various sources in the river, including in-situ and satellite data, in order to establish early experimental evidence of the NBS efficiency in the area. The measurements include data from automated hydrological stations from the OpenHi network, satellite remote sensing data and field measurements performed along the Spercheios River basin. For each measurement used, different analysis has been performed based on data availability and pertinence to the NBS efficiency. Preliminary results presented here show that the NBS functions as designed and provides protection against flooding in the area, and can potentially diminish the risk of drought. The results are in agreement with the numerical outputs already presented in our previous work. Full article

The large-scale surface-water monitoring infrastructure for Greece Open Hydrosystem Information Network (Openhi.net) is presented in this paper. Openhi.net provides free access to water data, incorporating existing networks that manage their own databases. In its pilot phase, Openhi.net operates three telemetric networks for monitoring the quantity and the quality of surface waters, as well as meteorological and soil variables. Aspiring members must also offer their data for public access. A web-platform was developed for on-line visualization, processing and managing telemetric data. A notification system was also designed and implemented for inspecting the current values of variables. The platform is built upon the web 2.0 technology that exploits the ever-increasing capabilities of browsers to handle dynamic data as a time series. A GIS component offers web-services relevant to geo-information for water bodies. Accessing, querying and downloading geographical data for watercourses (segment length, slope, name, stream order) and for water basins (area, mean elevation, mean slope, basin order, slope, mean CN-curve number) are provided by Web Map Services and Web Feature Services. A new method for estimating the streamflow from measurements of the surface velocity has been advanced as well to reduce hardware expenditures, a low-cost ‘prototype’ hydro-telemetry system (at about half the cost of a comparable commercial system) was designed, constructed and installed at six monitoring stations of Openhi.net. Full article