HR: 17:30h
AN: H54B-05    [Abstracts]
TI: Sustainable Water Resources Management in a Complex Watershed Under Climate Change Scenarios
AU: Schuster, J P
EM: jschuste@ing.uchile.cl
AF: Universidad de Chile, Av. Blanco Encalada 2002, piso 3, Santiago, Chile
AU: * McPhee, J
EM: jmcphee@ing.uchile.cl
AF: Universidad de Chile, Av. Blanco Encalada 2002, piso 3, Santiago, Chile
AB: The Aconcagua River Basin in central Chile supplies water for over one million people, high-return agriculture, mining and hydropower industries. The Aconcagua river basin has Mediterranean/semi-arid climate, its hydrologic regime varies along its path from snow- to a rainfall-dominated, and significant stream-aquifer interaction is observed throughout the river path. A complex water market operates in the Aconcagua River Basin, where private owners hold surface and subsurface water rights independently of land ownership and/or intended use. The above yield integrated watershed management critical for the sustainability of basin operations, moreover under conditions of significant precipitation interannual variability and uncertain future climatic scenarios. In this work we propose an integrated hydrologic-operational model for the Aconcagua River in order to evaluate sustainable management scenarios under conditions of climatic uncertainty. The modeling software WEAP (Water Evaluation and Planning System) serves as the platform for decision support, allowing the assessment of diverse scenarios of water use development and hydrologic conditions. The hydrologic component of the adopted model utilizes conceptual functions for describing the relations between different hydrologic variables. The management component relies on economic valuation for characterizing the space of efficient operational policies.
DE: 1630 Impacts of global change (1225)
DE: 1807 Climate impacts
DE: 1847 Modeling
DE: 1880 Water management (6334)
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: 2007 Joint Assembly