Water Resour Manage Research Articles

Effectiveness of Adaptive Operating Rules for Reservoirs

In this paper, a methodological proposal is made to develop an adaptive decision support system for reservoir management. The system is based on an optimization model that determines operating rules that meet certain optimality conditions based on the state of the reservoir at a certain time and on a streamflow forecast, if available. The model is based on Spiliotis et al. in Water Resour Manage 30:5759-5778, where a general methodology was developed to specify static operating rules for reservoir systems. The proposed methodology consists of modifying the optimization procedure developed in the previous work to dynamically update operating rules to adapt management to the changing situation. To evaluate its effectiveness, the methodology was applied to the Pisuerga-Carrión reservoir system, in the Spanish part of the Duero basin. The results obtained with adaptive rules were compared with those obtained applying the same static operating rule for the entire analysis period. Adaptive rules were found to lead to better operating results, particularly if a successful streamflow forecast method is available.

Techno-commercial Assessment of Concurrent Municipal Brown Field Reclamation Procedures: A Pivotal Case study of Jawahar Nagar Dump Site

Techno-commercial Assessment of Concurrent Municipal Brown Field Reclamation Procedures: A Pivotal Case study of Jawahar Nagar Dump Site

Study on the applicability of the SCS-CN-based models to simulate floods in the semi-arid watersheds of northern Algeria

Algeria has experienced catastrophic floods over the second half of the twentieth century, causing many deaths and extensive material damage. This study was conducted to find a suitable event-based rainfall-runoff (RR) model for semi-arid conditions, where continuous data are not available in all regional basins. The study compared, based on data availability, the SCS-CN model based on the antecedent moisture conditions (AMC) and four modified SCS-CN models incorporating antecedent moisture amounts (AMA) in order to find the best model to reproduce the flood hydrographs in two catchments. The modified models were predominant over the SCS-CN method. Nonetheless, the Singh et al. (Water Resour Manag 29:4111–4127, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-015-1048-1 ) model (M4) and the Verma et al. (Environ Earth Sci 76:736, 2017a. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-017-7062-2 ) model (M5) were superior and demonstrated more stable structures. Coupled with the Hayami routing model, the models showed promising results and were able to reproduce the observed hydrographs’ shape. However, it was impossible to choose the preferred model since they each excelled as to a criterion. Therefore, the corresponding outputs were combined using the simple average (SA) method and the weighted average (WA) method. We found that the WA method showed better results in the two catchments and allowed a more accurate prediction according to the performance criteria.

Climate Variability Impact on the Spatiotemporal Characteristics of Drought and Aridityin Arid and Semi-Arid Regions

Investigating the spatiotemporal distribution of climate data and their impact on the allocation of the regional aridity and meteorological drought, particularly in semi-arid and arid climate, it is critical to evaluate the climate variability effect and propose sufficient adaptation strategies. The coefficient of variation, precipitation concentration index and anomaly index were used to evaluate the climate variability, while the Mann-Kendall and Sen’s slope were applied for trend analysis, together with homogeneity tests. The aridity was evaluated using the alpha form of the reconnaissance drought index (Mohammed & Scholz, Water Resour Manag 31(1):531–538, 2017c), whereas drought episodes were predicted by applying three of the commonly used meteorological drought indices, which are the standardised reconnaissance drought index, standardized precipitation index and standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index. The Upper Zab River Basin (UZRB), which is located in the northern part of Iraq and covers a high range of climate variability, has been considered as an illustrative basin for arid and semi-arid climatic conditions. There were general increasing trends in average temperature and potential evapotranspiration and decreasing trends in precipitation from the upstream to the downstream of the UZRB. The long-term analysis of climate data indicates that the number of dry years has temporally risen and the basin has experienced succeeding years of drought, particularly after 1994/1995. There was a potential link between drought, aridity and climate variability. Pettitt’s, SNHT, Buishand’s and von Neumann’s homogeneity test results demonstrated that there is an evident alteration in the mean of the drought and aridity between the pre- and post-alteration point (1994).

A basin-wide approach for water allocation and dams location-allocation

Construction of new dams in undeveloped transboundary basins causes two serious disputes between the stakeholders: conflicts over more water interest and over the new dams’ locations. Hence, water development planning of these basins needs to be done in conjunction with the examination of stakeholders’ new water shares. This study extends the model presented in Roozbahani et al. (Water Resour Manag 31:4539–4556, 2017) to be multi-objective and applies the methodology outlined in Roozbahni et al. (Ann Oper Res 229:657–676, 2015a) to solve the model. The proposed three steps approach determines the equitable allocation of the surface water of an undeveloped transboundary basin while determining optimal number, locations and capacities of new dams. The first step utilizes a mixed-integer-multi-objective model to outline the water shares of stakeholders, as well as optimal dam locations for a given number of dams. Using a sensitivity analysis, the second step pinpoints the required number of dams. The role of third step is the exploration of the dams’ lowest possible capacities. Environmentally, our approach takes the entire watershed’s water requirements into account. We have applied the proposed approach to the Sefidrud Basin, a transboundary basin located in Iran. The results of the approach show that, to significantly improve the security of the Sefidrud Basin’s water supply, three new dams would be optimal.

An enhanced SMA based SCS-CN inspired model for watershed runoff prediction

Incorporation of initial soil moisture (V 0) in the Soil Conservation Service Curve Number (SCS-CN) methodology helps to avoid the sudden jumps in Curve Number (CN) and, in turn, in computed runoff. It invoked the development of an enhanced (yet simple) Soil Moisture Accounting (SMA) procedure-based-SCS-CN inspired model, by incorporating initial moisture (V 0). Its performance is tested using a dataset of 152 small to large watersheds of USDA (total 38,169 storm events), and compared with original SCS-CN method, Mishra and Singh (Acta Geophys Polon 50(3):457–477, 2002), Michel et al. (Water Resour Res 41(2):W02011, 2005) and Singh et al. (Water Resour Manag 29(11): 4111–4127, 2015) model using four statistical indices (RMSE, R 2, PBIAS and NSE) and rank grading system (RGS). The proposed model scores highest (= 691 marks out of maximum 2280 marks) (Rank I) followed by Singh et al. (Water Resour Manag 29(11):4111–4127, 2015) model with 642 marks (Rank II), Michel et al. (Water Resour Res 41(2):W02011, 2005) model with 376 marks (Rank III) and Mishra and Singh model with 362 marks (= Rank IV). The original SCS-CN model, however, performs the poorest of all with 209 marks (Rank V).

Thermal variations of water in the Nam Song stream/Mekong River: II. Experimental data and theoretical predictions

The goals of this study were to use the Nam Song River as a case study for parameters determination and a comparison between the measured data and the mathematical model developed in the first paper of this study. The kinematic wave equation [especially Eq. 16a in Ben-Asher et al. (Sustain Water Resour Manag, 2016. doi: 10.1007/s40899-016-0044-9 )] was expanded to a Taylor series that was used to determine several system parameters including the thermal time constant, the steady state solution, and the daily thermal cycle. Water temperature measured and calculated by the model varied from minimum of 23–24 °C at night to maximum of 27–29 °C at midday. From March 16 to March 25 2004, stream and air temperature were monitored at a point located 4 km downstream from the Nam Song Dam. The average hourly water temperature and its standard deviation were extracted from a family of daily sinusoidal curves. Monitoring downstream data were similar to results assumed by the theoretical model. The effect of water discharge rate on its temperature and on the changing energy input during daytime hours was considered. The analysis indicated that the only controllable system variable is the water flow velocity (V). It can be optimized through a controlled release of water from the dam. The mathematical analysis also identified and quantified the parameters which govern the water environment. The theory as well as the experimental data indicated that for the conditions studied, an increase in water discharge at the dam prevents an increase in water temperature downstream and thus helps to keep the fisheries and domestic water quality of the river in a healthier condition.

An iterated local search algorithm for water distribution network design optimization

The optimal design of water distribution networks is a complex non‐linear combinatorial optimization problem. It consists in finding the least‐cost pipe configuration that satisfies hydraulic laws and customer requirements, using a limited set of available pipe types. In a previous paper (De Corte and Sörensen, Eur J Oper Res 228 (2013), 1–10), we have argued that state‐of‐the‐art optimization algorithms proposed in this domain are unduly complicated and poorly tested. The main contribution of this article is a straightforward, fast, transparent, and effective iterated local search (ILS) algorithm that has at least equivalent performance when compared to the best approaches in the literature, but has a much simpler algorithmic structure. A full‐factorial experiment is conducted to obtain the heuristic's best parameter settings. Contrary to existing algorithms, the ILS algorithm is additionally shown to perform well on a broad set of much more challenging HydroGen (De Corte and Sörensen, Water Resour Manage 28 (2014), 333–350) test instances. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. NETWORKS, Vol. 67(3), 187–198 2016

Probability Analysis of Crop Water Stress Index: An Application of Double Bounded Density Function (DB-CDF)

Soil moisture is an uncertain variable due to rainfall randomness. Furthermore, its density function is hybrid in nature, with spikes at maximum and minimum soil moisture (saturation and field capacity). Both of these properties are also considered for crop water stress index. The crop water stress index can be used to show the sensitivity of a crop to deficit irrigation. In this paper, a new methodology is proposed to probability analysis of water stress index using Double Bounded Density Function (DB-CDF) and moment analysis of crop water stress index. For this purpose, two equations were developed for the first and second moments of water stress index. To find out the value of the proposed moment equations, they are used as constraints in a stochastic model of crop water allocation as developed previously by Ganji and Shekarrizfard (Water Resour Manage 25:547–561, 2010). After verification of the model, the DB-CDF of soil moisture stress index was estimated using the value of proposed moments in the growing periods. The results show that in case of deficit irrigation, the probability of crop water stress occurrence is high and as a consequence, any unpredictable water shortage leads to yield reduction. The application of the proposed methodology is novel and has not been reported in the literature to date.

Soil Erosion Prediction Using GIS and Remote Sensing on Manjunto Watershed Bengkulu, Indonesia

Soil Erosion Prediction Using GIS and Remote Sensing on Manjunto Watershed Bengkulu, Indonesia

Erratum to: Using Information-Gap Decision Theory for Water Resources Planning Under Severe Uncertainty

Water Resour Manage (2013) 27:1173–1174DOI 10.1007/s11269-013-0276-5The online version of the original article can be found at http://dx.doi.org10.1007/s11269-012-0164-4.B. Korteling (*)Geography, College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, Amory Building,Rennes Drive, Exeter EX4 4RJ, UKe-mail: bak203@exeter.ac.ukS. DessaiSustainability Research Institute and ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy,School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UKe-mail: S.Dessai@leeds.ac.ukZ. KapelanEngineering, College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences, University of Exeter,Harrison Building, North Park Road, Exeter EX4 4QF, UKe-mail: Z.Kapelan@exeter.ac.uk

Discussion of “Assessments of Impacts of Climate Change and Human Activities on Runoff with SWAT for the Huifa River Basin, Northeast China” by Aijing Zhang; Chi Zhang; Guobin Fu; Bende Wang; Zhenxin Bao; and Hongxing Zheng

Zhang et al. (Water Resour Manag doi: 10.1007/s11269-012-0182-2 , 2012) studied the impacts of climate change and human activities on the runoff for the Huifa River basin. They employed a soil and water assessment tool (SWAT), which was calibrated for the baseline period 1956–1964, and then used to reconstruct the natural runoff for the climate change period 1965–2000. Results showed that both climate change and human activities decrease the observed runoff. Climate change impacts on annual runoff were −37.7, −59.5, +36.9, and −45.2 mm/a for 1965–1975, 1976–1985, 1986–1995, and 1996–2005 respectively, compared with the baseline period 1956–1964. Human activities decreased runoff and caused a relatively larger magnitude impact than those of climate change after 1985. Human activities decreased the annual runoff by −32.9, −46.8, −67.8, and −54.9 mm/a for 1965–1975, 1976–1985, 1986–1995, and 1996–2005 respectively. Human activities further decreased runoff in wet years due to regulation and storage of water projects.

Getting Outside the Water Box: The Need for New Approaches to Water Planning and Policy

North American water systems are inadequately prepared to deal with an uncertain future climate and other uncertainties relevant to long-term sustainability. Despite Milly et al.’s (2008) dramatic proclamation in the February 2008 issue of Science that stationarity—the idea that natural systems function within a known envelope of variability—is dead, the water resources community has been slow to embrace new paradigms for long-term water planning and policy. Too much attention has been focused on reducing, clarifying, and representing climatic uncertainty and too little attention has been directed to building capacity to accommodate uncertainty and change. Given the limited ability to forecast the future climate, emphasis must shift to the human actors and social dynamics of water systems, including planning processes, work practices, operational rules, public attitudes, and stakeholder engagement. Many in the water management community have been led to believe that climate adaptation is primarily a science problem—that we need to wait for the results of new rounds of climate modeling and downscaling to reduce uncertainties about future climate conditions. Trenberth (2010), however, has noted that, as our knowledge of the climate system increases, so also has our understanding of factors we previously did not account for or even recognize, such as the release of greenhouse gases from melting permafrost, the fertilizing effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide on vegetation, and the effects of aerosols on clouds. As climate models begin to incorporate these processes, they will inevitably disagree about the nature, extent, and geographic patterns of climate-change impacts. Decision makers will be confronted with more, not less, uncertainty about the future climate. This uncertainty is problematic for an industry that has traditionally relied on predict-andplan methods of operations and management. Water planning usually involves forecasting future trends or desired states and then identifying the infrastructure needed to support them. Optimization models, the favored tools of water planners worldwide, seek the most efficient Water Resour Manage (2013) 27:955–957 DOI 10.1007/s11269-012-0222-y

Climate Change: A Growing Challenge for Water Management in Developing Countries

Water managers today are faced with the daunting task of evolving management strategies and policies in the face of not only the large uncertainty associated with the climate change impacts but also, to some extent, a sense of perplexity and confusion that the issue of climate change seems to have created because of conflicting views, opinions and even scientific projections on the impending regional water situations. Such a sense of confusion is particularly pronounced in the developing countries, where the capacity to understand the different issues of climate change as it affects the water systems is extremely limited among water managers. They are aware that they must cope with abnormal situations more frequently than they used to, that the future is not likely to be similar to the past and that therefore they need guidance from the scientific community in dealing with the evolving situation. Even a small part of the huge amount of scientific work dealing with impacts on water availability, water demands, water quality and frequencies and magnitudes of floods and droughts has, however, not yet found its way into policy interventions and decision making. Impact studies relevant to water resources management address situations of decreasing water supply and simultaneous increase in water demands. Downscaled projections of temperature, precipitation, windspeed, relative humidity and net radiation are typically used for assessing the future irrigation (and other) water demands; projections of streamflow, obtained either directly by downscaling or through use of a hydrologic model, are used in assessing impacts on the water supply and water quality. The ensemble approach that uses climate simulations from a large number of models for several future scenarios is commonly used to address the model and scenario uncertainties. Use of hydrologic models in impact studies in river basins brings along an additional source of uncertainty due to the usually large number of parameters calibrated based on limited historical data, and assumed stationarity over the future period. Such uncertainties at all levels of impact assessment— from climate models to emission scenarios, downscaling and hydrologic models—seem to discourage the water managers from using the results of climate impact studies. Additionally, the impacts and adaptive responses are generally provided for a far-distant time Water Resour Manage (2013) 27:953–954 DOI 10.1007/s11269-012-0223-x

Water Systems Adaptation: An Australian Cultural Researcher’s Perspective

Humans are often regarded as endpoints of water supply systems, their behaviour adjustable to match supply constraints or savings targets. But they are also its starting points: only by means of surveyors, scientists, engineers, governments and technocrats have the waters of Earth come to be systematised into extractable, managed and commodified resources available to meet human-defined objectives, such as improved public health and domestic convenience, in an environment made increasingly uncertain owing to global rearrangements of terrestrial resources (including carbon) by humans. An early responder to challenges of sustainability and climate change, the water sector developed demand reduction strategies that now provide examples—not all emulable—for adaptation strategies in other sectors. Broad acceptance of ‘triple bottom line’ sustainability, realisations that experts’ solutions are contestable by publics and require their cooperation, and growing responsibilities for demand management involving consumption and consumers, have all highlighted water’s social dimensions. But as in the climate change sector, where “The drivers of the carbon based economy are embedded in culture, history and politics, rarely the realm of biophysical scientists” (Bellette 2012, p.5), there is a problematic mismatch between the technical and scientific expertise of water managers and the nature of the demand they attempt to predict and control. Lacking expertise to deal with the complex social character of water demand, yet seemingly reluctant to recruit it, the water industry mobilised its supply-side experience to formulate resource-centred approaches that emphasised efficiencies, volumes and pricing. This strategy maps the limits of the water supply system, then determines how to change people’s water behaviours and household fittings to fit system constraints. Information and technology could turn householders into rational and efficient ‘micro-resource managers’; social marketing could convert them into guilty customers who would change their attitudes, Water Resour Manage (2013) 27:949–951 DOI 10.1007/s11269-012-0224-9

Water Resources Allocation Using a Cooperative Game with Fuzzy Payoffs and Fuzzy Coalitions

In this paper, two fuzzy cooperative games are utilized for modeling equitable and efficient water allocation among water users in both inter-basin and intra-basin water allocation problems. The proposed all-inclusive water allocation approach consists of three main steps, following Sadegh et al. (Water Resour Manage 24(12):2991–2310, 2010). In the first step, an initial water allocation is carried out using an optimization model taking into account an equity criterion. In the second step, the water users form crisp coalitions with fuzzy characteristic functions to increase the total net benefit of the system and also their own benefits. In the methodology used in this step, the water users do not need to have exact information about their payoffs and they can evaluate their payoffs as fuzzy numbers. In the second step, based on the Hukuhara difference of fuzzy numbers, optimum water allocation strategies are determined using a game with fuzzy characteristic function. In the third step, we applied another methodology which considers a class of fuzzy games with fuzzy characteristic functions and also fuzzy coalitions for water allocation. The methodology of this step is on the basis of the Hukuhara difference and the Choquet integral. The usefulness of the mentioned methodologies is studied by applying them to three defined real life scenarios in a case study of water allocation in Iran. The results showed that the proposed methodologies are professionally appropriate to real-world uncertain problems of equitable and economic inter-basin and intra-basin water resources allocations.

REPLY to Discussion of “Precipitation Forecasting Using Wavelet-Genetic Programming and Wavelet-Neuro-Fuzzy Conjunction Models”

The authors would like to express their gratitude for the interest shown by the discussers in the paper and for their comments on the subject. We have tried to clarify all the points raised by them in this closure. The discussers say in their discussion that “... the computational mechanisms used in this study are all relatively new and therefore require more detailed reporting throughout all stages of the modelling process, accompanied by better justification of decisions influencing model development.” The authors do not agree with this because this method was used in lots of study by various researchers before (Wang and Ding 2003; Anctil and Tape 2004; Kisi 2008; Adamowski 2008; Nourani et al. 2009; Partal and Cigizoglu 2009; Adamowski and Sun 2010; Adamowski and Chan 2011) and detailed methodology can be found in many related textbooks (e.g. Burrus et al. 1998; Welnut 2004). Partal and Kisi (2007) arbitrarily used ten resolution levels in their study. We employed three resolution levels following the suggestion of Wang and Ding (2003). According to the Wang and Ding (2003), in general there is log (n) resolution level, where n is the length of the time series. In our study, 2550 daily data were used in training period. This (log2550) approximately gives three resolution levels. We agree with the discussers that Partal and Kisi (2007) used same data and found different results in their study. They divided data into two sets, training (12 years daily data) and testing (3 years daily data). Shiri and Kisi (2011) divided data into three parts, training, test and validation. They used 7 years daily data for training, 4 years for testing and remaining 4 years for validation. The authors were used db5 wavelet in their study because this is one of the commonly used wavelets (Wei et al. 2011). The time series A+D2+D3 was obtained by removing D1 Water Resour Manage (2012) 26:3663–3665 DOI 10.1007/s11269-012-0060-y

Water Governance in a Climate Change World: Appraising Systemic and Adaptive Effectiveness

The starting point for this Special Issue is the proposition that climate change is real and anthropogenic factors contribute to the nature and rates of change. In its Climate Change 2007 Synthesis Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) identified major consequences for water resources as a result of global warming (IPCC 2007). Adaptation around these impacts will be integral to the evolution of water resources management. However the idea that socio-ecological systems based around water governance will have to adapt over time clearly is not new, nor confined to climate change impacts. Nonetheless, climate change introduces a strong impetus, and under this aegis, we explore in this Special Issue how climate change becomes ‘real’ in the lives of citizens and the activities of policy makers through the lens of water and its governance, including management. Moreover, ‘[t]his situation is one of global concern; it raises questions of how water policy makers, policy implementers and researchers will work together to enhance social and institutional innovation for effective implementation of climate change adaptation policies in different countries’ (Ison et al. 2011). Not all articles adopt climate change as the core paradigm for analysis, but all explore in various ways the systemic and adaptive effectiveness of water governance in circumstances where change is a central dynamic. To this extent, the articles have a common theme in that adaptation in water governance is best understood ‘as a co-evolutionary dynamic’ (Collins and Ison 2009). Globally there are many real-time ‘experiments’ in water governance under way. It is therefore timely to pause and offer some critical reflections on the viability of these ‘experiments’ in this Special Issue. We refer to ‘water governance experiments’ to acknowledge that we are entering a period where there is a need, in a climate changing Water Resour Manage (2011) 25:3971–3976 DOI 10.1007/s11269-011-9902-2

Special Issue: Sustainable Development of Energy, Water and Environment Systems

The 5th Dubrovnik Conference on Sustainable Development of Energy, Water and Environment Systems (held in 2009) was attended by 307 scientists from 55 countries and 6 continents. The majority of the participants focused on methods, policies and technologies for increasing the sustainability of development, while always considering the economic, environmental and social aspects involved. With special reference to water science, the presented articles considered the link of both pillars of the conference (i.e. water and energy) all under the prism of environmental sustainability. The selected papers mainly discuss state-of-the-art water resources management issues which refer to applied international approaches and policies. Among others, they discuss water resources management issues in the framework of the European Water Framework Directive (WFD) 2000/60/EC, advanced technologies in the field of wastewater treatment (WWT) as well as engineering water works for water storage techniques and methodologies. Water Framework Directive 2000/60/EC is considered as one of the most important legislative enactments -within the context of European environmental law and policywith respect to the management and protection of water resources within the European region. Bilaletdin et al., use steady state and dynamic modeling approach in order to assess the impacts of different loading scenarios of water quality of Lake Onega, the second largest lake in Europe, as demanded by the WFD. Martinez et al., assuming that the physical laws are called to be the objective and universal tools to assess water costs, developed Physical Hydronomics (PH) as the accounting tool for the WFD application, regarding its physicochemical objectives. Water Resour Manage (2011) 25:2917–2918 DOI 10.1007/s11269-011-9888-9