Report on Model Development

Aral Sea Regional Allocation Model for the Amudarya River

by Daene C. McKinney, Akmal K. Karimov, and Ximing Cai

 

 

Ongoing research on efficient water allocation is taking place in the Central Asian Republics at the Institute of Engineers for Irrigation and Mechanism of Agriculture (IEI), Tashkent, Uzbekistan and in the USA at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin). Cooperation between these two institutions and other agencies, ministries, or institutes in the Republics has allowed the development of a water allocation model for the Amudarya River of the Aral Sea basin. This model supports the planning of water distribution between water economical districts in the Amudarya basin. In addition, the model takes into account the salinization of water in the basin. A more detailed model has also been developed for the Kashkadarya River basin which considers irrigation runoff or drainage from individual irrigation districts.

The work undertaken in this project was conducted under the Regional Cooperation activities of the Central Asian Regional Office of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) sponsored Environmental Policy and Technology Project (EPT). EPT is tasked with promoting regional cooperation and policy development between and among the Central Asian Republics, with technical assistance from U.S. experts and institutional counterparts. The work described in this report is part of EPT’s applied demonstration project program of Delivery Order 8 (DO8). It is in support of the request for new research in the area of water management to support EPT work in Central Asia on the problems of the Aral Sea.

This report describes the model development activities undertaken by Dr. Daene C. McKinney of UT Austin and Dr. Akmal K. Karimov of IEI and others in the project team for the development of the Amudarya water allocation model.

. The overall objectives of the project were to:

The decision support system integrates the advantages of GIS techniques into regional water resource allocation modeling. GIS software has a powerful capacity to represent real world water resource systems, and it can provide very useful information for building water resource allocation models. In this project the real-world water resource system and the abstract mathematical model are integrated in the GIS environment. Changes to the system in the real world can be input to the GIS and they are automatically reflected in an updated mathematical model.

The modeling system developed here is an interface between the GIS software, ARCVIEW, and its object-oriented scripting language AVENUE, and GAMS, a mathematical optimization software package. The water resource system is represented by maps, tables and charts in ARCVIEW. A mathematical model based on a network representation of the water resources system is used for water allocation, and GAMS is used to solve this model. Given the coverages and attributes which describe the water resource system in the real world, the modeling system (1) transfers geographic information into a form compatible with the mathematical model; (2) based on the geographic information, it builds a multiobjective optimization model in a format compatible with GAMS; (3) it calls the GAMS software to solve the model; and (4) the system displays the results in the GIS format.

The GIS-based decision support system for regional water resources planning was demonstrated for portions of the Aral Sea basin: the Amudarya River and Kashkadarya River basins.

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