The CHESS project has as its overall objective to investigate how expected changes in climate will affect the quality of freshwater resources in Europe. To achieve this, a common modelling framework is developed, comprising catchment and river models of water quantity and quality and that incorporates pollution from diffuse sources(e.g. agricultural) and point sources (e.g. industrial and urban effluents). Simulators used in this framework are SWAT (USDA) and Questor (Institute of Hydrology). The models are being validated against a set of study catchments in five European countries for the present day conditions. For future conditions, different scenarios are considered, based on different global circulation models.
