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Management, Protection and Sustainable Use of Groundwater and Soil Resources - Phase III and IV

The project in its third and forth phase (April 2004 - July 2011) has the main objective of developping and making available

an efficient, inexpensive and easily sharable water planning and management tool - (Decision Support System - DSS)

in order to work together towards a more integrated water resources management in the Middle East and beyond.

 

Activities:

1. Establishing a data and information base

2. Developing applying a DSS-Software (WEAP21, MODFLOW2000, additional Models)

3. Application of a DSS in two pilot areas (Zabadani Basin, SYRIA and Berrechid Basin, MOROCCO)

4. Institutionalizing (including capacity building)

5. Dissemination

 

The Decision Support System (DSS) for Soil and Groundwater Management in the two pilot areas will give decision makers the necessary insight into the current status and the possible scenarios of the future development (population growth, agriculture development, etc.). In both pilot areas (Zabadani Basin Syria, Berrechid Basin Morocco) a water conflict between concurrent users already exists and so far no abstraction limits/ abstraction monitoring is implemented. Therefore the project aim is to collect all relevant data, get the representative water users together and jointly decide after the winter rains and the resulting calculated stored groundwater volumes by the aid of the DSS on the water shares for the current hydrologic year and future ones.

 

Concept:
 
.

The DSS consists of 3 major components:

 

1. Project database: climate, well, spring, groundwater level, river discharge, groundwater/ surface water abstraction, soil, land use, irrigation data, etc.

2.

2.2. Groundwater Flow Model (MODFLOW): for spatial assignment and calculation of the actual groundwater storage at each time step.

3.

3.3. WEAP21 Model: as a user friendly planning-, evaluation-, scenario-calculation-and visualisation-tool (www.weap21.org)

 

The Project Database is designed for each pilot area separately, depending on the available local data sets. For the DSS-models the open source code MODFLOW 2000 and the for developing countries freely licensed software WEAP21 is applied in order to share and spread the DSS-Tool through the Arab region avoiding licensing costs and problems. A dynamic link between MODFLOW and WEAP21 and some additional WEAP21 modifications are developed for the DSS-improvement in cooperation with the Stockholm Environmental Institute (SEI), Boston, USA.