The inventWater project is an Innovative Training Network (ITN) within the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action, an EU funded project. Its goal is to provide training for future water quality experts. It focuses on the development of robust forecasting tools for river, lake and reservoir water quality on regional to global scales (inventWater). The increasing availability of meteorological data products and advances in modelling is an asset that will be used in order to achieve the project goals. inventWater provides funding for 15 Early Stage Researchers (ESRs), located at different educational institutions across Europe. One of the projects (ESR2) is carried out at the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Ruhr-University-Bochum.

This particular research project integrates climate and water monitoring data into an existing, process-based, water quality modelling tool (WorldQual). This is achieved through the application of different machine learning approaches and will foster the improvement of future water quality projections of lakes and reservoirs with higher temporal resolution. The research has two major objectives: 1) to study the effects of extreme weather conditions on water quality of reservoirs and lakes and 2) to run the model until 2100, considering ‘business as usual’ climate change scenario as well as the ‘mitigation scenario’ over several decades. Plausible projections of the changes in water quality of lakes and reservoirs as a result of climate change will be obtained.