Date of Award:

12-2011

Document Type:

Thesis

Degree Name:

Master of Science (MS)

Department:

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Committee Chair(s)

David Rosenberg

Committee

David Rosenberg

Committee

Bruce Bishop

Committee

David Stevens

Abstract

Water is a scarce natural resource while the demand for water grows constantly. In Utah, most of the water resources have already been developed. In addition, Utah is prone to drought events and the effects of climate change may exacerbate the already dire situation. Hence, managing this scarce resource efficiently is very important in meeting the growing demand.

Reservoirs are used to store water which is subsequently released to meet demands. For management purposes, reservoirs have different zones such as flood control zone, conservation zone, buffer zone and inactive zone. Water is normally released from the conservation zone. The water in the buffer zone can be subjected to carryover depending on the reservoir operation policy adopted.

In this work, a software environment called WEAP is used to model the Weber River Basin. WEAP has a special parameter called the buffer coefficient which decides how much of the water in the buffer zone is to be allocated at any time step.

This study provides a tool which could be coupled with an optimization program to decide an optimum storage carryover in a system.

Checksum

7ac30595fa046bcc474529df6233b269

Comments

Publication made available electronically December 21, 2011.

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