PUB in practice: case studies - Runoff Prediction in Ungauged Basins: Synthesis across Processes, Places and Scales - page 354

Figure 11.86. Some different characters of Swedish rivers.

was also necessary to initiate extensive data collection,
methodological development and technical solutions.
In Sweden, five new water districts with authority dir-
ectly coming from the government were established and
environmental quality objectives were considered in
national legislation. In 2008 the Swedish Government
demanded the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological
Institute (SMHI) to provide the relevant information at the
resolution defined by the water authorities. Sweden is rich
in surface water and the authorities requested data (e.g.,
river discharge) for 17 000 sites in 2009 and 38 000 sites in
2011. In comparison to these high numbers, only some 400
gauging stations for river runoff were available and, even
though mobile stations were introduced to supplement
these, methods for estimation and regionalisation had to
be applied. Thus, a national hydrological model system
with high resolution was implemented, using which most
of the predictions were done for ungauged basins.

forest belt and most of the country is covered by conifer
forests. The north-western border towards Norway is a
mountain range (the Scandes) of up to 2000 metres in height;
the north-eastern border towards Finland is a river, while the
longest border is the coastlines of the Baltic Sea and the
North Sea. In total, 118 rivers discharge to the surrounding
seas and with very few exceptions all of the river basins are
on Swedish territory. Sweden has almost 10 million inhabit-
ants who are mainly settled in the southern part and along the
coastline. This is also where the agricultural regions are to be
found. The study area thus shows a large variety in charac-
teristic landscapes ( Figure 11.86 ) .
For the whole country, the water authorities have
defined 7232 lakes and 15 563 river reaches for status
reporting to the EU according to the WFD. However, the
national monitoring programme is rather sparse, e.g., there
are about 400 hydrological gauges and some 900 sites
where grab samples of nutrient concentrations are taken
every month. To estimate water and nutrient flows with the
requested resolution the country was delineated into 17 000
(and later more than 35 000) catchments covering the
country and associated basins in Norway and Finland
( Figure 11.87 ). The delineation was received from the
Swedish Water Archive at SMHI and has mainly been

Description of study area
Sweden is a country in northern Europe of 450 000 km 2 ,
which is rich in surface water, with more than 100 000 lakes
larger in area than 0.01 km 2 . The country is part of the Boreal