Towards multi-scale integrated hydrological models using the LIQUID framework

Simulation models are valuable tools to answer various complex environmental problems and compare the consequences of different scenarios of land-use or climate changes. The community recognizes the need for a flexible modeling environment, allowing the building of integrated models customized for a specific case study and taking into account the objectives of the planners or scientists, the landscape specificity and the data availability. To fulfill this goal, such an environment should accelerate the development of interoperable models by reusing libraries and templates and enable to assemble modules into an integrated model with a minimum of coding and knowledge about the internal structure of the modules. This paper presents such a platform, called LIQUID, which is developed for multi-scale integrated and distributed hydrological modeling.