HR: 15:10h
AN: H23L-07    [Abstracts]
TI: Hydrosystems Modeling in an Andean River Basin Under Development and Climate Change Scenarios
AU: Schuster, J P
EM: jschuste@ing.uchile.cl
AF: Departamento de Ingenieria Civil, Facultad de Ciencias Fisicas y Matematicas. Universidad de Chile, Av. Blanco Encalada 2002, Santiago, RM 8370449, Chile
AU: * McPhee, J
EM: jmcphee@ing.uchile.cl
AF: Departamento de Ingenieria Civil, Facultad de Ciencias Fisicas y Matematicas. Universidad de Chile, Av. Blanco Encalada 2002, Santiago, RM 8370449, Chile
AB: The Aconcagua river basin is located in the central zone of Chile, has a Mediterranean-type climate, and its runoff regime is markedly nivo-pluvial. Water main users include agriculture, mining, hydropower, industry and domestic supply. Rapid growth of land use for high-value crop agriculture and countrywide expansion of power demand has increased pressure over water resources in the Basin. On the other hand, integrated management of watershed resources is complicated by the fact that in Chile water rights become private property once allocated. This work demonstrates the development of a hydrologic-operational simulation model for the Aconcagua River Basin using the Water Evaluation and Plannning (WEAP) System, which allows to integrate diverse uses of the river basin and varied scenarios of development as well as hydrologic conditions. The proposed model is used to evaluate the performance of several development strategies with respect to stakeholders preferences, including infrastructure, land use change and conjunctive use of groundwater and surface water resources. Additionally, the influence of hydrologic and climatic uncertainty on water rights reliability and other typical management assumptions (such as the concept of hydrologically independent "river sections") is assessed by direct input of climate change scenarios contained in the IPCC IV report to the hydrologic model.
DE: 1807 Climate impacts
DE: 1847 Modeling
DE: 1879 Watershed
DE: 1880 Water management (6334)
DE: 1884 Water supply
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting