Water quality management worldwide

This article analyzes water quality on a global scale. An overview of the global water supply and demand situation is presented first, including regional and country information, as well as data on selected water use patterns. The focus then shifts to a discussion of water pollution, its various causes, impact, and remedies, with emphasis on legal and administrative solutions. Water pollution control expenditures and the resultant achievements are dealt with in the final third of the article, with projections to 1995. A wide variety of published sources was dovetailed to obtain a composite picture and most likely scenario; this was supplemented with primary interviews by the author conducted in North America, Western and Eastern Europe, and Oceania at the start of the 1980s.     

Restoration ecology of riverine wetlands: II. An example in a former channel of the Rhône River

Riverine wetlands, which provide numerous valuable functions, are disappearing in floodplains of a channelized European river. A restoration project has been proposed by scientists to restore a former braided channel of the Rhône River by the removal of fine organic sediments in order to enhance groundwater supply. A precise and intensive prerestoration monitoring program during one year (including comparison with a reference channel) has taken into account several variables and ecological performance indicators measured at various spatial and temporal scales. Three restoration techniques were then suggested, taking into account two characteristics of ecosystem functions for increasing restoration success and self-sustainability: (1) the riparian forest as well as the shores must be preserved or disturbed as little as possible; and (2) the upstream alluvial plug must be preserved to prevent direct supply of nutrientrich water from the Rhône River. Among the three restoration options proposed, it was not possible to carry out the less ecologically disturbing one as it was considered too expensive, time consuming, and difficult to realize. A precise and intensive postrestoration monitoring program, conducted over two years, demonstrated restoration success but also unpredicted problems, such as a locally thick layer of fine organic sediment. As long as a self-sustainable state is not achieved, this monitoring should be continued. Afterwards, a less precise and less intensive long-term monitoring should enable the detection of future events that may influence ecosystem changes.     

CHANGES IN WATER POLICY IN THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA1

ABSTRACT: Ideology has predisposed the People's Republic of China against the use of prices to allocate water. Prolonged drought in north China has made the Chinese more aware of their unfavorable water resource inventory and the expense of expanding supply. Therefore, as part of the economic liberalization commenced since the death of Mao Zedong, China has started to make more active use of pricing to regulate demand and reduce the need for supply expansion.     

ANALYTICAL REGRESSION STAGE ANALYSIS FOR DEVILS HOLE,DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL PARK,NEVADA1

ABSTRACT: Devils Hole is a collapse depression connected to the regional carbonate aquifer of the Death Valley ground water flow system. Devils Hole pool is home to an endangered pupfish that was threatened when irrigation pumping in nearby Ash Meadows lowered the pool stage in the 1960s. Pumping at Ash Meadows ultimately ceased, and the stage recovered until 1988, when it began to decline, a trend that continued until at least 2004. Regional ground water pumping and changes in recharge are considered the principal potential stresses causing long term stage changes. A regression was found between pumpage and Devils Hole water levels. Though precipitation in distant mountain ranges is the source of recharge to the flow system, the stage of Devils Hole shows small change in stage from 1937 to 1963, a period during which ground water withdrawals were small and the major stress on stage would have been recharge. Multiple regression analyses, made by including the cumulative departure from normal precipitation with pumpage as independent variables, did not improve the regression. Drawdown at Devils Hole was calculated by the Theis Equation for nearby pumping centers to incorporate time delay and drawdown attenuation. The Theis drawdowns were used as surrogates for pumpage in multiple regression analyses. The model coefficient for the regression, R²= 0.982, indicated that changes in Devils Hole were largely due to effects of pumping at Ash Meadows, Amargosa Desert, and Army 1.     

Water supply and sanitation services for all: global progress during the 1990s

The Earth may be largely covered with water, but over one billion people are estimated to be without safe drinking water and almost 2.5 billion (40% of the world's population) without adequate sanitation at the outset of the new millennium. The provision of safe water and sanitation for all poses several serious institutional and economic challenges at international, national and local levels. Despite the various political commitments made from the late 1970s onwards, these commitments have remained largely unfulfilled. Even though some efforts to expand coverage have been made over the past two decades, much of those efforts have been undermined by socioeconomic problems and growing population, particularly in the urban areas of developing countries. The water supply and sanitation sector is actually in acute need of new investments for expansion and maintenance of facilities. Nonetheless, some positive trends can be discerned, such as, for example, the increasing recognition of integrated water resources management, environmental sanitation, public-private partnerships and women as a key for improvement and expansion of services.     

MULTICRITERIA PROGRAMMING OF WATER SUPPLY SYSTEMS FOR RURAL AREAS1

ABSTRACT: The aim of this paper is to present a multicriteria methodology for decision aid at the stage of programming a water supply system (WSS) for a rural area. The programming stage is an intermediate one between planning and designing water supply facilities, and can be decomposed into two problems: (a) setting up a priority order of water users, taking into account socio-economic criteria; and (b) choosing the best technical variant of the WSS. Among the criteria considered for the latter problem, there is a criterion of distance between the socio-economic priorities of users and the precedence orders of users according to the technical programming, which plays a coordinating role between problems (a) and (b). All steps of the presented methodology are illustrated by a real case study.     

MULTIOBJECTIVE DECISION MAKING TECHNIQUES FOR RESERVOIR OPERATION1

ABSTRACT: Six applications of multiobjective decision making techniques for finding optimal or satisfying operating rules for reservoir systems are presented. The examples include situations with hydropower vs. water supply (for irrigation), flood control vs. low flow augmentation, selection of an operating rule, low-flow vs. reliability, and low flow and recreation vs. water quality. The techniques applied include the constraint method, compromise programming, goal programming, Tchebycheff approach (max-mm), Consensus, and ELECTRE I and II.     

PROBABILISTIC GREAT LAKES HYDROLOGY OUTLOOKS1

ABSTRACT: The Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory developed a semiautomatic software package for making hydrological outlooks for the Great Lakes. These include basin moisture storages, basin runoff, lake heat storage, lake evaporation, heat fluxes, and net lake supplies, one or more full months into the future. The package combines GLERL's rainfall-runoff and lake evaporation models with near real-time data reduction techniques to represent current system states. Users select historical meteorologic record segments as candidate future scenarios to generate deterministic near real-time hydrological outlooks. GLERL has extended the package to make probabilistic outlooks for a decision-maker who must estimate the risk associated with his decisions. GLERL matches National Weather Service meteorologic outlook probabilities by selecting groups of historical meteorologic sequences, and constructs embedded outlook intervals for each hydrologic variable of interest. Interval probabilities are assigned from comparisons over a recent evaluation period. This physically-based approach for generating outlooks offers the ability, as compared to other statistically-based approaches, to incorporate improvements in the understanding, of process dynamics as they occur in the future and to respond reasonably to conditions initial to a forecast (such as heat and moisture storages), not observed in the past.     

TIDE GATE INFLUENCES ON A TIDAL MARSH1

ABSTRACT: Construction of a tide gate at the mouth of the north channel of the Savannah River in Georgia has resulted in significant changes in salinities influencing marsh community changes. The tide gate is directly responsible for a 2 to 6 mile upstream displacement of salt water in the river. In the marsh, soil salinities ranged from 0.0 ppt at upstream sites to 12 ppt at downstream sites when the tide gate was in operation. Within two months of taking the tide gate out of operation, interstitial salinities at the downstream sites dropped to 4 ppt. Influences of the tide gate on marsh vegetation were modeled in a geographic information system. With the tide gate out of operation, the model predicts that freshwater marsh would increase in area by 340 percent.     

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A MODEL TO EVALUATE HYDROLOGIC RISK IN WATER RESOURCE SYSTEM DESIGN1

In this paper, a procedure for analyzing a water resource system with special emphasis on evaluation of acceptable economic risk due to occasional failures to deliver water is proposed. The basic methodology includes the development of a simple mathematical model which describes the physical hydrologic and economic characteristics of a single reservoir irrigation and city water supply system and an evaluation of economic benefits of the system with full and partial deliveries of water. The system is simulated for various combinations of decision variables (system magnitudes) and an optimum design is obtained by response surface technology. Emphasis is placed on the basic model and methodology although, in order to introduce some realism, the procedure is applied to data based on the existing reservoir system on the South Concho River in West Central Texas.