Management of Water Resources and Demands in Mulla Sadra, Doroodzan and Sivand Dams Located in Bakhtegan-Maharlou Watershed

One of the problems of water resources systems in many countries is management and planning of optimal allocation of these resources. To date, several tools have been developed to model these systems according to the characteristics of the studied watershed. In this paper, by using WEAP model, water resources and downstream demands of Mulla Sadra, Doroodzan and Sivand dams, located in Maharlou-Bakhtegan watershed, Fars province, are simulated. On this basis, some management strategies were proposed under four management scenarios to combat the water shortages in demand areas, giving supply priority to domestic, environmental and agricultural demands. Simulations showed that the fourth scenario presents better results than other scenarios. So that with implementation of this scenario, water supply to the agricultural lands of Kamfirooz Plain, Arsanjan and Qasroddasht townships, Ramjerd agricultural lands and also water supply to Shiraz city could be provided with 100% reliability and drinking water of Arsanjan and Saadatshahr cities could be supplied with reliability of 39.24 to 100%. Also, this model showed that water demand for agricultural lands in Kerbal Plain is 100% reliable in November and February, and in the rest of the months, the reliability for water supply is zero. Therefore, the agricultural lands in Kerbal Plain will face high water scarcity in March-June. Therefore, development of agricultural lands in Kerbal Plain should be reconsidered according to the simulation results.