Cloud Data Scraping for the Assessment of Outflows from Dammed Rivers in the EU. A Case Study in South Eastern Europe

The availability of environmentally related data is a crucial issue in simulating natural processes. The proposed research demonstrates that although currently there is a plethora of data published on the internet, by national and international official sources, their retrieval is sometimes hard to be achieved; hence smart programming tools/technologies could facilitate the automatic harvesting of these data in personal databases for the qualitative and quantitative assessment of hydrosystems that encompass hydropower schemes. The implemented methodology relies on the use of custom-made web scrapping tools to access dams’ hourly outflows in combination with water demand data in order to investigate the water balance, as modified by human intervention, in areas located downstream of dams. For this purpose, derivatives of the Electricity Market Directive and Water Framework Directive of the European Union (EU) have been regarded as web-based databases. The outcomes of the methodological approach demonstrate that the modelled net water discharges downstream—i.e., the river discharges after subtracting the water demands—are assessed with high simulation accuracy at a daily time scale. The reliability of the output estimates is further supported by the combination of measured data from gauge telemetry with the data derived by the proposed methodology. This research allows new insights, such as dams’ outflows and water demand retrieval and exploitation, into the sustainable management of water resources and contributes to the quantification of rivers’ outflows to the coastal zone.