Predicting Future Water Demand

Abstract

Decentralization within metropolitan areas has been a major aspect of population movement in the United States over the past two decades. This trend has great significance for all urban service activities. In particular, it affects water supply planning in urban areas. Both numbers of people and their spatial location affect forecasting of water supply demands which, in turn, affect fixed plant investments (source works, treatment works, transmission lines, distribution systems, and so forth) which are frequently built many years in advance of the resulting services. This paper describes, via a case study, the use of population and per capita demands as a basis for forecasting water requirements. Water use is studied according to residential and nonresidential demand. These data, combined with extrapolated demand coefficients, can be used as the basis for demand forecasting that not only provides estimates of quantity of demand but location of demand as well.