A water harvesting model for optimizing rainwater harvesting in the wadi Oum Zessar watershed, Tunisia

Ammar Adham, Jan G. Wesseling, Michel Riksen, Mohamed Ouessar and Coen J. Ritsema

Agricultural Water Management, 2016, vol. 176, issue C, 191-202

Abstract: Rainwater harvesting (RWH) techniques have been adapted in arid and semi-arid regions to minimise the risk from droughts. The demand for water has increased but water resources have become scarcer, so the assessment and modelling of surface water related to RWH in catchments has become a necessity. An understanding of the hydrological processes at the sub-catchment level is generally lacking, and little attention has been given to the assessment of RWH after implementation. The objective of this study was to develop a simple but generally applicable water-harvesting model and test it at sub-catchment level to evaluate and optimize the performance of RWH under different design and management scenarios. The model was applied to rainfall data for 1980–2004 in 25 sub-catchments of the watershed of Wadi Oum Zessar (south-eastern Tunisia). The performance and analysis of RWH in three types of years (dry, normal, and wet) are presented and discussed. This study emphasises the advantages of simulating long-term water balances at the sub-catchment level for improving our understanding of hydrological processes in the RWH system and provides several solutions for optimizing RWH performance in various scenarios. Changing the spillway heights together with the flow directions had a significant impact on the performance of RWH by making 92% of all sub-catchments supply sufficient water for crop requirements, compared to 44% of the sub-catchments in case of no changes.

Keywords: Arid and semi-arid regions; RWH; Water-balance; Optimizing; Tunisia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378377416302086
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:agiwat:v:176:y:2016:i:c:p:191-202

DOI: 10.1016/j.agwat.2016.06.003

Access Statistics for this article

Agricultural Water Management is currently edited by B.E. Clothier, W. Dierickx, J. Oster and D. Wichelns

More articles in Agricultural Water Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().