Study on Sustainable Utilization Coupled Management Model for Water Resources in an Arid Irrigation District (China)

The quantity of available water resources have been recognized as limiting factors in development of most of the arid regions. Therefore, sustainable use of water resources is key problem for development of these areas. In the present paper, Hetao irrigation district, one of the largest irrigation districts in the Yellow River basin, is selected as the research area. The sustainable utilization coupled management model for water resources is established by dynamically coupling numerical simulated model for ground water with optimal allocation model. In the coupled model, the groundwater level is adopted as the constraint condition and the optimal conjunctive utilization quantity of surface water and groundwater is set as the objective function. Finally, the coupled model is applied to calculate the optimal water supply quantity of surface water and groundwater and optimal sustainable utilization scheme of water resources in 2020 and 2030 of Hetao irrigation district. The results indicate that the water imported from the Yellow River can be reduced to the national limited amount of 4.0 × 10⁹ m³/a, with adjusting well-canal irrigated area and industry structure appropriately as well as using the ground water reasonably. The research result can offer a valuable reference to efficiently use water resources and prevent the salinization for other similar regions.