Integrative Hydrologic Modeling Techniques for Sustainable Water Management regarding Global Environmental Changes in the Upper Danube River Basin

German Ministry of Research and Education (BMBF), has been established to address the manifold consequences of Global Environmental Change on regional water resources in a variety of medium sized watersheds with different natural and cultural characteristics. In this framework, the Upper Danube watershed was selected as a representative mesoscale (A ~ 77.000 km) testsite for mountain-foreland situations in the temperate mid-latitudes. The major goal of the GLOWA-Danube project is to develop and use new modelling and integration technologies to integrate natural and socio-economic sciences in order to develop new ways to aid sustainable water resources management on medium sized watersheds. A university-based distributed network of experts combining water-related competence in the fields of engineering, natural and social sciences develops and utilizes the Global Change Decision Support System DANUBIA to investigate the sustainability of future water resources management alternatives. DANUBIA is developed on the basis of re-useable, refineable, and well-documented sub-models. It is object-oriented, spatially distributed and raster-based. For the first time in university based coordinated environmental research a standardized notation of parameters and functions and a platform-independent structure of computational methods and interfaces has been established using the Unified Modeling Language UML and the computer-language Java. The presented paper centres on the hydrology and water supply vie