Strategy support for irrigation and drainage water management in the western nile delta - challenges and options / Ahmed Abdeltawab Fahmy Abdelmeged Gharib ; Supervised Ashraf Hassan Mahib Ghanem , Aiman Mohamed Khalil Elsaadi , Ahmed Hussein Ahmed Soliman

Thesis (M.Sc.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Engineering - Department of Civil Engineering

Water scarcity in Egypt is one of the major problems which is increasing year by year. That is because of increasing demands of different sectors while the share of Egypt from the Nile River is constant at 55.5 bcm/y which is the main source of Egypt{u2019}s water budget. Further, Nile flows at the High Aswan Dam are threatened to decrease due to development projects in the upper Nile. As a result, reuse of drainage water by mixing drainage water into canals became one of the important nonconventional water resources in Egypt. The scope of the current research is to provide a decision support tool for simulating irrigation and drainage water in the Western Nile Delta through studying the availability of water for irrigation, municipal and industrial sectors including official and unofficial reuse of drainage water using data for the year 2014 as a base case. And, the simulation was made by using the water allocation numerical model RIBASIM that is developed by Deltares. The study area includes the cultivated lands served by irrigation canals taking water from Nile River and Rasheed Branch. Remote sensing methods were used to calculate the cultivated areas that reached 1.6 million feddan, then simulated as 87 calculation units according to their characteristics inside the model. The model was calibrated using the annual flows of drainage water at 26 locations along the drains. After calibration, 13 scenarios were tested. First, three scenarios were for water uses optimizing options in the current situation. Then six scenarios were tested to study the impacts of water shortage from 10% to 50% on the study area. And finally, four scenarios were tested to present the impacts of the available options to deal with the water shortages

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