Ground water and surface water under stress

Presented at Ground water and surface water under stress: competition, interaction, solutions: a USCID water management conference on October 25-28, 2006 in Boise, Idaho.Includes bibliographical references.Traditionally, the metered monitoring and quantification of water use by individual irrigators in Alberta has been almost non-existent. As the increasing competition for a limited and finite resource has become much more of a reality in some major river basins, this water management tool is now receiving much more critical attention. In response to that emerging need and a very specific water-sharing issue, a pilot water use-measuring project was devised and implemented within the concentration of just over 6,500 acres of private irrigation along the Canadian reach of the Milk River. This river basin is a unique watershed, rising within the foothills of western Montana, flowing northeastward into and across the southern-most region of Alberta and then back southeastward into northeastern Montana. It is associated with international water management agreements that are a challenge to administer effectively. A rigorous monitoring of water diversions and river flows is critical for the effective administration of the international water-sharing agreement. Of particular concern, for example, is the need to accurately quantify Canadian withdrawals of water that may have originally been diverted up-stream as American allocations. As a result, the Alberta Department of Environment has initiated a project to track instantaneous irrigation water withdrawals along the Canadian reach of the Milk River and have that information reported on a near real-time basis through a designated website

Irrigation demand model

Presented at the 2002 USCID/EWRI conference, Energy, climate, environment and water - issues and opportunities for irrigation and drainage on July 9-12 in San Luis Obispo, California.Includes bibliographical references.Like many jurisdictions in North America, the irrigation industry in Alberta, Canada has found it necessary to intensively examine its future state of development, in view of substantially increased competition for a finite supply of available water. In order to do so, it was recognized that available technical science and assessment tools needed to be up-dated and expanded. Specifically, the opportunity and ability to utilize state-of-the-art computer modelling techniques could allow much more detailed and varied analyses to be carried out. As part of a broad scope basin water management planning review, the development of a complex irrigation demand model was undertaken. After several years of detailed and intensive software development, a suite of data input, irrigation simulation and analysis tools has been derived. The application of the irrigation demand model component provides for very detailed projections of daily water requirements, consumptive use, conveyance and application losses, as well as return flows. Annual and multi-year irrigation demands can be determined in conjunction with water supply conditions that reflect both the interrelationship with the vagaries of climate as well as varying scenarios of development within the industry. In particular, output from the application of the whole suite of tools indicates both the projected level of water supply deficits as well as the potential impacts of those shortages

Infrastructure management system for enhanced irrigation district planning, An

Presented during the Third international conference on irrigation and drainage held March 30 - April 2, 2005 in San Diego, California. The theme of the conference was "Water district management and governance."Includes bibliographical references.The common issues of population and economic growth pressures and aging infrastructure, across the province of Alberta, indicated the need for some enhanced level of reinvestment in that infrastructure. The government-sponsored Capital Planning Initiative (CPI) was implemented as an on-going process improving the level and type of information provided to decision-makers, specifically related to a diverse inventory of all infrastructure that had a government-funding component associated with it. As a result of annual capital works funding provided to Alberta's 13 irrigation districts by the Government of Alberta, their works could be eligible for on-going and enhanced CPI funding. In order to provide appropriate and effective information to the CPI process, an Irrigation District Infrastructure Management System (IDIMS) was developed. It not only provided a means to quantify the cost of aging irrigation infrastructure and its current condition, it also assisted irrigation districts in qualifying and quantifying the state of their works for their continual re-construction planning. A web-based interactive software package known as the Irrigation District Web-based Infrastructure Management System (I.D.WIMS) was developed and implemented, now providing a common reference for consistent evaluations on the need for and extent of capital re-investment from one district to another.Sponsored by USCID; co-sponsored by Association of California Water Agencies and International Network for Participatory Irrigation Management

Irrigation water use tracking system

Presented during the Third international conference on irrigation and drainage held March 30 - April 2, 2005 in San Diego, California. The theme of the conference was "Water district management and governance."Includes bibliographical references.Across the 13 irrigation districts in the province of Alberta, there is no direct volumetric financial charge attached to water diversions and consumption. Individual water users pay specific and fixed annual rates per unit of irrigation area defined within their respective assessment rolls, regardless of the actual volume of usage. However, as water is becoming a more stressed resource, with increasing competition for limited supplies by a diversity of users, and with greater public call for more accountability on the part of water users, it is becoming increasingly understood that some form of volumetric accountability is warranted. As virtually none of the 10,000-plus water delivery turnouts have any metering facilities whatsoever, it has been necessary to develop some alternative form of water use tracking to compile reasonable records of individual diversions. Even though these volumes of diversion are not currently tied to water use charges, many of the districts have implemented limits on deliveries to individual land parcels. A Water Use Module (WUM) software package has been developed that tracks water use based on the duration of water deliveries to each irrigation system in each field and the respective capacity of each of those systems. This package has recently been up-dated to take advantage of opportunities to interface with the Internet for more real-time, more accurate and more comprehensive irrigation information reporting.Sponsored by USCID; co-sponsored by Association of California Water Agencies and International Network for Participatory Irrigation Management