Project Name Details International
Computer Aided River Management (CARM) for the Murrambidgee River, Australia (van Kalken et al., 2012)
The CARM project is based on MIKE CUSTOMISED by DHI and MIKE by
DHI software and is an example of an operational DSS in river catchment management. The Murrambidgee region experienced its worst drought on record and this drove innovation in river operations through the CARM project. It was found that the river was operated based on the experience of the river operators using simple water balance concepts. CARM integrates models with real time measurements including rainfall, forecasts, river flow and abstractions that automatically update the model.
The CARM optimised solution has been shown to significantly reduce dam releases without compromising irrigation water security (van Kalken et al., 2012). It is envisaged that the CARM system will establish the Murrambidgee river as one of the most efficient regulated river systems in the world. The project won the Australian Water Association’s National Award for Infrastructure and Innovation.
The solution revolves around an open IT, data and modelling decision support system, capable of integrating a wide range of data feeds, modelling tools and GIS providers and includes provision for customization to meet specific end user requirements.
DSS for Thailand’s Hydro and Agro Informatics Institute (HAII)
After severe flooding along the Chao Phraya River during 2011, Thailand’s Hydro and Agro Informatics Institute (HAII) developed an operational water management decision support system. The system was based MIKE CUSTOMISED by DHI solution software using rela time data to provide the required information for effective short and medium term flood forecasting and warning (DHI signature Project Flyer).
Operating Rules for the Incomati and Maputo Watercourses (TPTC, 2011)
This is one of 12 projects recently completed under the programme for the Progressive Realisation of the Inco-Maputo Agreement (PRIMA) for the Governments of the Republics of Mozambique, South Africa and the Kingdom of Swaziland. It included, amongst others, objectives to develop integrated operating objectives for the optimised management and use of the water resources in each catchment; develop operating rules for both trans-boundary river systems, taking into account the functioning of the existing systems; develop information management systems which will incorporate data such as river flows, storage volumes and water demands in the river catchments; develop operational decision support systems for the integration and optimisation of short and medium term operating rules.
The proposed rules indicated, inter alia, that:
The short term yield-reliability functionality in the integrated MIKE Basin IncoMaputo model in conjunction with anticipated water demands and current catchment storage conditions, to assess the medium term availability of water be used.
Cross border flows should no longer be dictated by fixed minimum daily flow rates, but should rather be dictated by actual water demand in the downstream country/countries. This implies a variable cross border flow driven by ecological and/or irrigation demand patterns.
The current approach for the operation of the KOBWA and Crocodile systems, which entails a balanced system and/or annual allocations to ensure that the risk of emptying the dam(s) is within acceptable limits, be maintained.
Improve co-ordination between the lower Komati and Crocodile catchments in terms of conjunctively complying with minimum cross border flows into Mozambique be implemented
A Terms of Reference for tri-lateral Systems Operation Task Groups (SOTGs) for the Incomati and Maputo catchments respectively were developed.
Remote Sensing Cooperation with SATWATER and 5 Dutch Waterschappen
The ICMA and Waterschap Groot Salland have entered into a 3 year remote sensing cooperation for mutual learning agreement commencing in 2012. Learning from this cooperation will be incorporated.
National (South African) Operating Rules and Decision Support
Models for
Management of the
Surface Water
Resources. Sabie River Catchment (DWAF, 2003)
The project described in detail how the Sabie Catchment should be managed from a water resources point of view once the Inyaka Dam and Transfer Pipeline were in full operation. Part of the OR’s were the decision support models, which were aimed at providing tools to assist the ICMA to manage the water resources of the Sabie catchment.
However, the OR’s have never been implemented mainly due to the lack of sufficiently skilled staff and the fact that the river system was not stressed at the time. There was also a lack of cooperation from the responsible government departments and a lack of knowledge about the OR’s, with certain stakeholders complaining that they were not involved in the development of the rules from the beginning (Agterkamp, 2009).
A Real-Time Operating Decision Support System for the Sabie- Sand River System (Sawunyama et al., 2012)
This project has developed a yet to be implemented real time DSS that allows catchment managers to assess on an ongoing basis who requires water, at what times, what releases need to be made from the Inyaka Dam and whether or not restrictions should be imposed on certain users. This is achieved through the integration of three models. A black-box rainfall- runoff model (WRC, 2012), to forecast probable water in a system at any given time, a river flow management (hydraulic) model – WAS (Benadé et al., 1997) - which keeps an account of water release to users and abstractions made by users and a long Term Water Resources Planning
model –WreMP (Mallory et al., 2010) – to ensure that operational decisions do not exceed long term statistics.
Disaggregation software developed through the WRC project (WRC K5/1979, 2012) to disaggregate Pitman monthly hydrology to a new daily time series using sequencing from ACRU daily hydrology was extended to develop the black-box daily rainfall-runoff model to be used to generate forecasted flows.
The main conclusions from the hydrology review conducted by this project are that the rapidly reducing numbers of rain gauges that remain operational are a cause for great concern and consideration should be given to re-opening old reliable stations and or the establishment of new gauges.
A further concern is the inability of the various models developed and used to be linked together and run automatically, as is possible through the DELFT FEWS and DHI software solutions. They thus require manual input of data and running.
However, the black –box rainfall-runoff model has demonstrated the benefit of stochastic hydrology with serial correlation constraints incorporated and this will be considered.
The RISKOMAN and
WATPLAN Projects The ICMA is currently a major client and project partner for two projects funded by European Union and the WRC in South Africa, called WATPLAN and RISKOMAN.
“RISKOMAN” stands for “Risk Based Operational Management” which neatly summarises the main purpose of the project being that of improving operational river management. This implies real time or near real time management and decision making regarding water use, restrictions on water use, dam releases and river flow management to meet the conflicting needs of the ecological flow requirements, international obligations and water users while also ensuring that the long term risks of system failure are not exceeded.
WATPLAN is a research project under the EU-FP7 program with the objective to develop and implement an operational earth monitoring system for the international Inkomati catchment. It is providing evapotranspiration, biomass, land use and rainfall data at a weekly time step at medium (30m) resolution.
Real-Time Decision Support System for the Crocodile East River Catchment (Hallowes et al., 2007; DWA, 2010a)
A Real-Time DSS for the Crocodile East River Catchment (CROC DSS) was developed by DWA using MIKE CUSTOMISED by DHI and MIKE by DHI software, which the ICMA has obtained approval to implement.
This DSS incorporates a lot of the recent learning about river operations and the need for hydroinformatics and that planning and operations are important and must be linked to the same data sources.
Two important issues stemming from the project are:
The system could be enhanced considerably, with the improvement of the monitoring network; particularly improvements to the rainfall monitoring will improve estimates, and
The primary driver in the model was daily rainfall per quinary catchment, based on data from NOAA satellites. This rainfall data, which is a mean rainfall depth over a grid cell at a 0.1°
resolution (~10km), is not entirely suitable for use in hydrological models. The intensity of rainfall, which is high in the region due to summer thunderstorms, is not represented appropriately in the data. This changes the simulated hydrology considerably, and the project team struggled to get good regression statistics during the calibrations.