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Significance Statement
Researchers from Heriot-Watt University Scotland in collaboration with Cranfield University England and IIT-Roorkee in India are collaborating on a multi-institutional project titled “Mitigating climate change impacts on Indian agriculture through improved irrigation water management (MICCI)”. They are investigating the effects of projected climate change and its variability on irrigation water security in India and evaluating the effectiveness of better irrigation and water management strategies in mitigating any resulting water shortages thereby improving the productivity of the available water.
The authors in the hydrology paper used HYSIM rainfall-runoff model which uses rainfall and potential evaporation data to simulate the hydrological cycle (surface runoff, percolation to groundwater and river flow) on a continuous basis. This enabled the impacts of projected changes in climatic attributes (precipitation, temperature, etc.) on future water resources availability in the case study Beas River Basin in Himachal Pradesh to be simulated. Extensive reservoir simulation studies on the multi-purpose Pong reservoir in the Basin showed that dwindling water availability in the future will lead to significant deterioration in the performance of this major water resources infrastructure unless improvement in its operational management is carried out. Examples of such improved operational practices were developed and tested with resounding success. Although applied to an Indian Basin, the methodology is sufficiently generic that it can be extended to other south Asian countries. This paper should improve our understanding of the climate change water problem and offer solutions that are robust and effective for Indian irrigators.
Journal Reference
Water Resources Management, January 2016, Volume 30, Issue 2, pp 445-470.
J. Adeloye1, B.-S. Soundharajan1, C. S. P. Ojha2, R. Remesan3
[expand title=”Show Affiliations”]- Institute for Infrastructure and Environment Heriot-Watt University
- Department of Civil Engineering IIT-Roorkee
- Cranfield Water Science Institute Cranfield University [/expand]
Abstract
This study has evaluated the effects of improved, hedging-integrated reservoir rule curves on the current and climate-change-perturbed future performances of the Pong reservoir, India. The Pong reservoir was formed by impounding the snow- and glacial-dominated Beas River in Himachal Pradesh. Simulated historic and climate-change runoff series by the HYSIM rainfall-runoff model formed the basis of the analysis. The climate perturbations used delta changes in temperature (from 0° to +2 °C) and rainfall (from −10 to +10 % of annual rainfall). Reservoir simulations were then carried out, forced with the simulated runoff scenarios, guided by rule curves derived by a coupled sequent peak algorithm and genetic algorithms optimiser. Reservoir performance was summarised in terms of reliability, resilience, vulnerability and sustainability. The results show that the historic vulnerability reduced from 61 % (no hedging) to 20 % (with hedging), i.e., better than the 25 % vulnerability often assumed tolerable for most water consumers. Climate change perturbations in the rainfall produced the expected outcomes for the runoff, with higher rainfall resulting in more runoff inflow and vice-versa. Reduced runoff caused the vulnerability to worsen to 66 % without hedging; this was improved to 26 % with hedging. The fact that improved operational practices involving hedging can effectively eliminate the impacts of water shortage caused by climate change is a significant outcome of this study.
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