Drought management and planning for water resources

Droughts and their management are a serious challenge to water resource professionals. While droughts predominate in warm, arid regions, their frequency and severity in more temperate regions with more abundant rainfall have been on the rise. This book provides an essential collection of planning and management tools for minimizing the negative impacts of droughts. Comprehensive and up-to-date, it covers water conservation and reuse, conjunctive use and use of marginal resources, desalination, deep groundwater extraction, optimisation modelling, and decision support systems. The book presents best management practices that maximize efficiency reliability, and economy while minimizing the potential for adverse effects to the environment and human health. Providing practical methodologies, the chapters discuss how conjunctive water use can increase water availability in the developing world and what types of conjunctive use schemes are the most promising. The book examines the feasibility of a drought watch alert system and the legal and administrative framework required. It also explores the application of the Optimization Models and the Decision Support Systems to the study of different water management alternatives under drought conditions.