Mohsin Hafeez

The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon produces an important inter-annual variability of oceanic and atmospheric conditions with irregular periods and amplitudes in many regions of the world. Some research showed that the strongest connections between Southern Oscillation and Australian rainfall occur in northern and eastern Australia, especially in Murray-Darling basin. In the present study, we evaluate the ability of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) to monitor the Murray-Darling Basin vegetation behaviour to ENSO induced precipitation anomalies. 10 year time series of Spot/VEGETATION 1km NDVI imagery product (1998-2007) were collected. We calculate the correlation between NDVI and ENSO quantitative indices like the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI). Although the SOI is only a temporal index, we use it as a general indicator for the water stress probability. In this research, we focus on Murray-Darling Basin, at same time, we choose Murray Irrigation Area as...

Evapotranspiration (ET) is an important component of water balance. However, its quantification at a large irrigation system is not a simple task. Since the last two decades, many retrieval algorithms using optical satellite imageries were developed to estimate spatially distributed actual ET at regional scale, and are effective in irrigated upland crops. To date, it is not known whether these algorithms also work well for areas under irrigated lowland rice in the tropics. Lowland rice grows under continuously flooded conditions, ...

The Bureau of Meteorology's National Water Account is a key part of the Council of Australian Government's National Water Initiative to increase public confidence in water management. The National Water Account currently covers nine water management regions which are home to about 80% of Australia's population and represent 70-80% of Australia's water use. The National Water Account, which relies on close collaboration with many government agencies and water service providers, is a comprehensive water information report providing detailed insight into the management of Australia's water resources at a national and regional level. Parallel to these improvements, inputs from Australian Water Resource Assessment Landscape (AWRA-L) and the recently introduced Australian Water Resource Assessment River (AWRA-R) models from the Water Information Research and Development Alliance are contributing to improve the National Water Account in terms of accuracy and coverage of...

Global water scarcity is becoming a constraint for human development. Therefore there is a need to enhance water productivity of the irrigated and rainfed agriculture to meet the increasing food demand due to the population growth. This paper describes modeling efforts to assess present and future water needs for food, people and environment. This exercise is being carried out by the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage (ICID) in five countries, China, Egypt, India, Mexico, and Pakistan, which together cover 51% of irrigated area and 43% population in the world. This paper presents two modeling frameworks including the food security approach of the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) through policy dialogue model (PODIUM), an environmental approach i.e. the Basin wide Holistic Integrated Water Assessment (BHIWA) model and its system dynamic version using VenSim environment.

Globally, water data and information are needed for sustainable planning and management of water resources taking into account climate change. Assessing water resources, and accounting for their availability and use at a regional, national and continental scale, requires comprehensive and consistent information on water distribution, storage, availability, and use. This information needs to be accurate, up-to-date and take account of local climatic and hydrological conditions. It also needs to be produced in a robust, transparent and repeatable manner. The Australian Water Resource Assessment (AWRA) Modelling System is a new integrated continental hydrological simulation system used as an operational model at the Bureau of Meteorology. It has been developed to enable the Bureau to meet its legislated role (as per the Water Act 2007) in providing an annual National Water Account (NWA) and regular Australian Water Resource Assessment reports. The AWRA Modelling System (AWRAMS) provide...

This paper analyses a rice dominated gravity-fed irrigation system in the Upper Pampanga River Integrated Irrigation System (UPRIIS) in Central Luzon, the Philippines, to quantify the water, energy and economic implications of water reuse at five different spatial scales.

In Indonesia, about 45 percent of land is located on slope and hilly areas with elevation ranges from 350 to 1500 meter above sea level. Along the time, population growth compels farmers to cultivate in steep slope upland by replacing native vegetation to annual crops with less soil conservation consideration. In hilly areas, the high intensity of rainfall volume (>1500 mm/year), which falls in certain months has resulted land slides and erosion in this areas. As consequences, upland productivity and economic viability tends to decrease, in addition to soil erosion and land degradation. In fact, the soil erosion has not only impacted negatively to upland farmers’ welfare but also created wider negative externality, reducing the lowland agricultural production. Soil erosion caused sedimentation in rivers, dams and water canals system, which in turn significantly reduced their capacity and caused severe flood and drought in rainy and dry seasons. Adoption of suitable land and water...

1 University of Wuerzburg, Department of Geography, Remote Sensing Unit, Am Hubland, 97074 Wuerzburg, Germany 2 German Aerospace Center (DLR), German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD), Oberpfaffenhofen, 82234 Wessling, Germany 3 CSIRO Land and Water Division and Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, NSW 2678, Australia 4 Center for development research (ZEF), Universtity of Bonn, Walter-Flex-Str. 3, D-53113 Bonn, Germany Email: christopher.conrad@uni-wuerzburg.de

The water resources of the Indus Basin, Pakistan are mostly exploited, however the demand for water is on a permanent rise due to population growth and associated urbanization and industrialization process. Owing to rapidly increasing population, the available surface water resources are not able to cope up with people's needs. The cropping intensities and cropping patterns have changed for meeting the increased demand of food and fiber in the Indus Basin of Pakistan. Cumulative effect of all sources water i.e rainfall, irrigation and groundwater resulted in the high cropping intensities in the Basin. Presently rainfall, surface irrigation and river supplies have been unsuccessful to convene irrigation water requirements in most areas. Such conditions due to high cropping intensities in water scarce areas have diverted pressure on groundwater, which has inconsistent potential across the Indus Basin both in terms of quality and quantity. Farmers are over exploiting the groundwat...

Spatial knowledge of land surface evapotranspiration and root zone soil moisture is of prime interest for environmental applications, such as optimizing irrigation water use, irrigation system performance, crop water deficit, drought mitigation strategies and accurate initialisation of climate prediction models especially in arid and semiarid catchments where water shortage is a critical problem. The recent drought in Australia and concerns about climate change has highlighted the need to manage water resources more sustainably especially in the Murrumbidgee catchment which utilizes bulk water for food production. This study focused on estimation of daily actual evapotranspiration and soil moisture in Yanco area

The study documents comprehensive analysis on informal groundwater marketing in upland Balochistan, Pakistan. Informal groundwater markets are emerging a feasible option to manage increasing water scarcity and declining water tables as a result of poor groundwater policies. First we evaluated the groundwater trading mechanism and later we empirically examined factors affecting the groundwater trading using logit econometric models. We did not observe any permanent groundwater transactions; only temporary groundwater exchange takes place. Two common transactions methods were noted – water in exchange for given crop share and cash payment per hour (flat rate per hour). In all, 60% respondents reported selling water for crop share. This form of transaction method intensifies as we move from high altitude areas to low altitude areas because water and land are relatively scarce at higher uplands. In general, the crop sharing rates were 33% of the crop output. Water trading in cash transa...

Efficient water use is the key for sustainable management of water resources. The major reason of non-efficient management of water resources, especially in developing countries, is nonavailability of reliable hydrological information about the actual water used by different agricultural crops with in a large irrigation system or at the basin scale. Therefore, an estimation of spatially distributed crop water consumption is important and challenging to determine water balance at different scales to promote efficient management of water resources. Remote sensing data can resolve difficulties in determining water balance due to scientific developments in the calculation of spatially distributed actual evapotranspiration. In this study, seven TERRA/MODIS satellite images were used on different dates (April 06, May 31, June 12, July 12, August 23, September 22, and October 24) during the summer cropping season of 2002 over Liuyuankou Irrigation System (LIS) located along the Yellow Rive...

In the context of required increase of food production for rapid population growth, it is critical to improve the productivity of water in the irrigation systems. It may require a lot of field investigations to gather this information at large and especially complex systems like the Liyuankou Irrigation System (LIS), located in located on the right bank of Yellow River in North West China. The use of geo-information techniques such as remote sensing and GIS data has come to override most of the difficulties encountered in collection of large amount of data, especially following the state-of-the-art development on the calculation of actual evapotranspiration.

World population is increasing at a fast rate resulting in huge pressure on limited water resources. Just about 3% of the earth's total water is freshwater that can be used for various applications including irrigation. Therefore, an efficient irrigation water management is crucial for the survival of human being. In our study area farmers need to order water based on their requirements. Once a request for water is made it typically takes about 7 days to get it at the farm gate from the upstream. Therefore, farmers need to estimate water requirement for the next 7 days in advance in order to get it at the farm gate on time. Currently there is no reliable tool available to the farmers of our study area for estimating future water requirement accurately. Hence, a water demand forecasting technique is crucial for the efficient use of available water. In this study we first prepare a data set containing information on suitable attributes obtained from three different sources namely ...

The Australian Water Resource Assessment (AWRA) modelling system is developed to enable the Australian Bureau of Meteorology to meet its legislated role in providing an annual National Water Account (NWA) and regular Australian Water Resource Assessment Reports. The system uses available observations and an integrated landscape – river water balance model to estimate the stores and fluxes of the water balance required for reporting purposes (Figure 1). The National Landscape model (AWRA-L) provides gridded estimates of landscape runoff, evapotranspiration, soil moisture, and groundwater recharge/storage/lateral flow, and has been calibrated towards reproduction of a nationwide streamflow dataset. The gridded model structure provides an option of incorporating spatial variability of climate, land cover and soil properties. The model can be constrained only against observed streamflow or a combination of streamflow and remotely sensed soil moisture and evapotranspiration. The water ba...

Recent world experience has increased awareness of the risks and consequences of water use decisions and the need for a new approach to decision-making that places greater emphasis on the involvement of local communities and communities of interest. Dealing with complexity, uncertainty and risk emerges as a shared need and responsibility for government and communities, highlighting the importance of mutual learning, shared knowledge and systems thinking. Local knowledge and effective long-term policy-stakeholderresearch partnerships can support social learning and a more adaptive and resilient approach to irrigation, water and catchment management. In this paper we discuss challenges and successes the Cooperative Research Centre for Irrigation Futures (CRC IF) System Harmonisation program experienced working with five irrigated regions across Australia. We also draw from these different regional experiences some common lessons for harmonising irrigation systems and confronting compl...

In Australia, recent drought conditions and climate change concerns have highlighted the need to manage water resources more sustainably especially in the Murray Darling Basin (MDB), which utilizes more than 70% of water for food production. Typically, improving water management in irrigated areas requires the analysis of real-time water demand to determine the options available to improve efficiencies in irrigation water’s distribution and use whilst enhancing its utility. Real-time water demand information in irrigated areas is a key for planning about sustainable use of irrigation water as it informs decision making. These activities are needed not only to improve water productivity, but also to increase the sustainability of irrigated agriculture by reducing irrigation water losses and the environmental footprint of irrigation activities. This paper presents an application of a holistic systematic approach of water accounting coupled with remote sensing and GIS technique at mult...

Alternate wetting and drying (AWD) has been attracting increasing interest, because it seems to reach several useful objectives: using less water to achieve the same result; thus increasing water productivity and profitability. It is the most widely adopted water-saving irrigation practice in China. This method of irrigation is characterized by: a) mid-season drainage during the later tillering stage of the crop and b) periodic soil drying 2-4 days in between irrigation events from panicle initiation to the harvest. In the mid-season drainage, the soil is dried out for 10-15 days, depending on the weather condition until some fine cracks appear in the soil. The aim of this paper is to better understand how reliable water supplies, from main reservoir, smaller reservoirs, and local ponds, are important for the adoption of AWD irrigation practices. We hypothesized that access to reliable water sources such as water ponds would increase the likelihood of practicing AWD for rice cultiva...

Recent drought and population growth are planting unprecedented demand for the use of available limited water resources. Irrigated agriculture is one of the major consumers of fresh water. Huge amount of water in irrigated agriculture is wasted due to poor water management practices. To improve water management in irrigated areas, models for estimation of future water requirements are needed. Developing a model for Irrigation water demand forecasting based on historical data is critical to effectively improve the water management practices and maximise water productivity. Data mining can be used effectively to build such models. Data mining is capable of extracting and interpreting the hidden patterns from a large amount of hydrological data. In recent years, use of data mining has become more common in hydrological modelling. In this paper, we compare the effectiveness of six different data mining methods namely decision tree (DT), artificial neural networks (ANNs), systematically ...

Increasing water productivity of irrigated rice remains the most promising challenge to tackle the increasing water scarcity problems. The aim of this study is, therefore, to measure scale effects on water productivity through water accounting coupled with remote sensing and geographic information system (GIS) in rice-based irrigation system of District I of the Upper Pampanga River Integrated Irrigation System (UPRIIS), Philippines. The water accounting is applied at five different spatial scales to study water savings and impacts on different scales. The spatial scale ranges from a micro scale at the size of farmers field (area of 1 ha), to sub-irrigation canal scale (10,000 ha) and a system scale (area of 18,000 ha) covering the entire District I area. Daily measurements of all surface water inflows and outflows, rainfall, evapotranspiration, and amounts of water internally reused through check dams and shallow pumping are summed into seasonal totals, from November 19, 2000 to Ma...

This paper presents the situation analysis of a re-use system of return flow for irrigation in District 1 of the Upper Pumpanga River Integrated Irrigation System (UPRIIS), Philippines. While elaborating the situation analysis, emphasis is given to quantification of water re-use and its related economic benefits under gravity-fed irrigation systems. This irrigation system presents a distinct geophysical feature which provides opportunities for capturing irrigation outflows from rice fields of upstream areas through a network of natural creeks. These creeks feed into check dams which divert irrigation supplies for downstream areas. In UPRIIS area, the major sources of re-use system include groundwater pumping, lifting surface water from creeks and irrigation supplies from check dams. Specifically, this study aimed to: a) quantify the current level of water re-use from creeks, groundwater and check dams; and b) to estimate the economic benefits of water re-use from pumping groundwater...

1 CSIRO Land and Water Division, Locked Bag 588, Wagga Wagga, NSW 2678, Australia 2 International Centre of Water for Food Security, Charles Sturt University, Locked Bag 588, Wagga Wagga, NSW 2678, Australia Cooperative Research Centre for Irrigation Future (CRC IF), Locked Bag 588, Wagga Wagga, NSW 2678, Australia Northeast Institute of Geography and Agricultural Ecology, CAS, Changchun, Jilin Province, China

Walker J.P. , J. Balling, M. Bell, A. Berg, M. Berger, D. Biasoni, E. Botha, G. Boulet,Y. Chen, E. Christen, R. deJeu, P. deRosnay, C. Dever, C. Draper, J. Fenollar, C. Gomez, J.P. Grant, J. Hacker, M. Hafeez, G. Hancock, D. Hansen, L. Holz, J. Hornbuckle, R. Hurkmans, T. Jackson, J. Johanson, P. Jones, S. Jones, J. Kalma, Y. Kerr, E. Kim, V. Kuzmin, V. Lakshmi, E. Lopez, V. Maggioni, P. Maisongrande, C. Martinez, L. McKee, O. Merlin, I. Mladenova, P. O'Neill, R. Panciera, V. Paruscio, R. Pipunic, W. Rawls, M. Rinaldi, C. Rudiger, P. Saco, K. Saleh, S. Savstrup-Kristensen, V. Shoemark, N. Skou, S. Soebjaerg, G. Summerell, A.J. Teuling, H. Thompson, M. Thyer, J. Toyra, A. Tsang, T. Wells, P. Wursteisen and R. Young

The aim of this paper is to evaluate economic trade-offs of introducing irrigation demand management measures to modify river flows in order to mimic natural flow variations in the rivers. A number of irrigation demand management options were identified through ...

ABSTRACT World population is increasing at a fast rate resulting in huge pressure on limited water resources. Just about 3% of the earth’s total water is freshwater that can be used for various applications including irrigation. Therefore, an efficient irrigation water management is crucial for the survival of human being. In our study area farmers need to order water based on their requirements. Once a request for water is made it typically takes about 7 days to get it at the farm gate from the upstream. Therefore, farmers need to estimate water requirement for the next 7 days in advance in order to get it at the farm gate on time. Currently there is no reliable tool available to the farmers of our study area for estimating future water requirement accurately. Hence, a water demand forecasting technique is crucial for the efficient use of available water. In this study we first prepare a data set containing information on suitable attributes obtained from three different sources namely meteorological data, remote sensing images and water delivery statements. In order to make the prepared data set useful for demand forecasting and pattern extraction we pre-process the data set using a novel approach based on a combination of irrigation and data mining knowledge. We then apply a decision tree technique to forecast future water requirement. We also develop a web based decision support system for the managers, farmers and researchers in order to access various data including the prediction of possible water requirement in future. We evaluate our pre-processing technique by comparing it with another approach. We also compare our decision tree based prediction technique with a traditional prediction approach. Our experimental results indicate the usefulness of our pre-processing and prediction techniques. Keywords: Demand forecasting, Data Mining, Decision Tree, Decision Support System, Water management, and Data pre-processing.

This study examines the wheat profitability and factors affecting its production under the Kareze irrigation system in Qilla Abdullah, Balochistan, Pakistan, during the year 2002-2003. The profitability of wheat was estimated using enterprise budget technique whilst ...