Hidrológiai Közlöny 2006 (86. évfolyam)

2. szám - Domokos Miklós: The co-operation of the hydrologists of the countries sharing the Danube Cathment, co-ordinated form Hungary during the period 2003–2005

35 The co-operation of the hydrologists of the countries sharing the Danube Catchment, co-ordinated from Hungary during the period 2003-2005 Domokos, Miklós VITUKI, Research Institute for Environmental Protection and Water Management, H-1095. Budapest, Kvassay J. u 1. Abstract: Kev words: The hydrological co-operation of the countries sharing the Danube Catchment, whose number at the beginning was 8 and now is 13, resulted in 1986 in issuing the Danube Monongraph, in three volumes. Since then, the compilation of thematic follow-up volumes of that Monograph has been under way, under the auspices of the International Hydrological Programme (IHP) of UNESCO, from which 11 volumes have been issued until September 2005. The-co-ordination of this co-opearation was the task of the Hungarian IHP National Committee during the period 2003-2005. The major events, actors and results of the by now 35 years long history of the co-operation are summed up in a Table. Danube Catchment, international co-operation, hydrological monograph The countries sharing 99.6% of the area of 817,000 km

2 of the Danube Catchment - whose number used to be 8, until the early 1990s, and amounts to 13 nowadays - had initiated in 1971, practically as a spontaneous association, a scientific co-operation with the main goal to collect cross-checked hydrological information, characterizing the whole Catchement, available from the archives of the countries concerned, to process them in an agreed-upon way and to publish them first of all as a prerequisite for planning water resources development in the whole Catchment. In this co-opeartion, Hungarian hydrologists have played an initiative and stimulating role from the very beginning. The result of the first decade and a half of the co-operation was in 1986 the publication of the Hydrological Monograph of the Danube Catchment (at that time still divided by the Iron Curtain) in three volumes (the activity on it having been directed, due to this political separation, parallelly by two international secretariats of coordination, residing in Bratislava and Belgrade). In 1987, at a meeting held in Budapest of the representatives of the IHP National Committees of the at that time still 8 Danubian Countries, it was decided to commence, as a continuation of the past successful co-operation resulting in the Monograph, - following in this respect also the pattern of the activities on the extension of Rhine Monograph, considered exemplary - the compilation by joint work of selected thematic follow-up volumes of the Danube Monograph, each of which dealing with aspects (such as sediment and ice regime, or the probabilities of flood wave concomitance) not dealt with in the Monograph itself. At the same time, the Budapest Mcetig also drafted and accepted the Principles of the further co-operation, postulationg (among others) that after 1987 the joint work, to be carried out according to a jointly accepted and continuously updated Working Plan - after having canceled the former, politically based separation - has to be implemented unitedly under the auspices of the International Hydrological Programme (IHP) of UNESCO, under the co-ordination of one of the periodically alternating IHP National Committes, volunteering and elected by the co-operating community. The participants of the Meeting also agreed (verbally, without fixing it in a written form) that the subsequently coordinating countries possibly should follow each other along the Danube, in a hydrographically downstream sequence. In accordance with the latter agreement, during the 19 years long period between 1987 and 2005, the hydrological co-operation of the already 13 countries sharing the Danube Catchment, has been co-ordinated first by the representative of the IHP National Committee of Germany for 6 years, then by that of Austria for another 6 years, after that by the representative of Slovakia for 4 years and finally by that of Hungary for 3 years (2003-2005). (During the next period from 2006 to 2008, the co-ordination will be with Serbia and Montenegro.) The report of the writer of the present paper about the history and the results of the first three decades of the co-operation (1971-2000), published in various journals (Domokos 2001a and b, 2002a and b), is also presenting selected examples picked out from the Danube Monograph itself and from its 7 thematic follow-up volumes, published before 2000 (three volumes of which having been compiled under the guidance of Hungarian authors), dwelling also on the comparison between the methodology and the results of the co-operation of the Danube Countries and those of two other important international hydrological co-opeartions: that in the Rhine Catchment and that of the FRIEND project, embracing the countries of the western and northern part of Europe. The present short statement is going to focus on the last tree years of the co-operation with a by now 35 years long history, i.e. on the period 2003-2005 co-ordinated from Hungary, whose results, as a section embedded between the events of the foregoing 32 years and the prevision onto the subsequent 3 years, are displayed in Table I (enclosed), from which, among others, the following facts can be seen: - During the 19 years elapsed since the publication of the Danube Monograph in 1986, the community could issue II follow-up volumes to that Monograph, containing, for the whole Danube Catchment, processed and agreed-upon hydrological information, considered to be the main goal of the co-operation. From among these 11 volumes, 4 ones have been issued during the last 3 years, co-ordinated from Hungary. The topics of these 4 volumes are the following: estimation of the critical annual flood discharges of ungauged small watercourses (volume No. VII), inventory of the hydrotechnical facilities of the Danube Catchment (volume No. VIII/1), discharge-statistical and phisio-geographical characterization of the runoff regime of watercourses (volume No. VIII/2) and the multi-annual hydrological balance of the Danube Catchment (volume No. VIII/3). Note that the last three volumes are, as provided by the Working Plan of the co-operation, the updated versions of the Chapters 1/5, II and III of the Danube Monograph of 1986, compiled by using the hydrometeorological data collected during the last 2.5 decades and (partly) more advanced methodologies.