BASIN MANAGEMENT IN THE SAN BERNARDINO BASIN AREA

Abstract

AbstractThe San Bernardino Valley Municipal Water District was formed in 1954 to master plan the long‐term water supply, including the importation of supplemental water, for that portion of the Upper Santa Ana River Basin area within the District.Prior to the development of a basin management program, the District first undertook to inventory the water resources available to it. Specifically, what is its quantity, distribution, quality, what stresses will the water supply be subjected to, and finally, how is it disposed of? To assemble and store this array of hydrologic data, the District, as part of its basin management program, has undertaken the creation of a hydrologic data base. To facilitate the storage and retrieval of all pertinent data, the District utilizes an on‐site high speed digital computer. Into this data base, the District has loaded all available information pertaining to ground‐water production, streamflows and diversions, rainfall, ground‐water levels, basin recharge, basin inflow/outflow, water quality, and consumptive use. Development and selection of alternative strategies is made more effective because of the availability of historic and real time hydrologic data. An additional benefit derived from the basin management program is that the updating of the operational economics associated with the importation of State Project water can be made with the benefit of the most current data available. This allows the District to optimize its programs and thus maximize the limited resources available to it.