Program

It is the quality of rainwater or snowmelt, but also, in general, of the water surrounding us in the cities that we are privileged to use, that we want to devote the second day of the conference to. Last year in Poland, the symbol of climate change was not, as in Switzerland, the melting glaciers but the dying river Oder. As with any catastrophe, there were probably many factors causing it, but they also included high temperatures, drought, excessive discharges of pollutants and, as a result, algal blooms. This spring, when we write these words in the media, there are more and more questions with a common denominator: will there be a repeat of this disaster this year? Building fear and an atmosphere of danger will certainly not help much here. It certainly will not increase the supply of clean water to the river or reduce the load of pollutants entering it, especially at such a hostile time of war when, for obvious reasons of protecting the security of our country, the production of heavy industry located in Silesia must be activated. Guided by these pragmatic considerations, we want on the second day to present solutions for treating rainwater or snowmelt and reducing emissions from storm overflow structures. These will include examples not only of individual technologies, but also of conceptual and modelling work undertaken on a larger scale of the entire drainage area. We will also address the issue of reducing water abstractions from the river, or groundwater, through greater use of in situ retained rainwater. Finally, in compliance with the tradition of previous years, we hope to present inspiring case studies from abroad. Our intention here is especially to demonstrate water quality or algal bloom forecasting tools already in operation around the world. Importantly, these will be solutions based on data obtained from the space domain, which is increasingly entering our lives, specifically from the use of remote sensing, such as satellite imagery. The rhetorical question is how much does the quality of our work and its effects on the environment depend on how good the data and modern tools we use are?