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
