Decision support and uncertainty in self-supply irrigation areas

2012 
The south-west of Western Australia (WA) has a large number of private earth dams, or farm dams, capturing water primarily for commercial irrigation. For agriculturalists and water authorities the management of these dams raises key questions regarding the total volume and timing of water that the dams intercept; and the reliability of irrigation water supplied from the dams to agricultural land. To address these questions, a decision support tool has been developed in eWater's Source modelling system. The tool simulates the water balance of farm dams and is designed to report on the reliability of supply of individual dams. This paper discusses the challenges of modelling farm dams on the individual scale, and compares this with previous studies that focussed on the catchment scale. Uncertainty in decision support was explored using a Monte-Carlo framework, and the results indicate that reliability of supply of a given dam can be predicted with greater certainty if streamflow has been gauged locally and the volume of dams upstream has been measured. Recommendations for future work to improve accuracy of simulations are provided.
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