Assessment of Improving Operational approaches to the Surface Water Resources on Groundwater Extraction Reduction within the Irrigation Districts; case study of Qazvin Irrigation District)

The objective of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of upgrading the water distribution and delivery systems within the main irrigation canals, on reducing the water pumping from the aquifer. Consequently, the energy consumption reduction and carbon emission reduction is investigated. To achieve this goal, a set of two practical canal automation alternatives, including a decentralized automatic system and centralized control system are designed and tested under the normal and severe (drought) scenarios of the main canal of Qazvin irrigation network. The results for the first scenario showed that the adequacy indicators are increased 13% and 28% respectively with employing the decentralized automated control systems and the centralized one. Accordingly, the reduction in extracting groundwater is declined about 26.6% and inconsequent the energy preservation due to pumping decrease is equal to 7.27% and the greenhouse gas reduction rate is obtained 24.1%. The results of the second scenario, representing the water shortage conditions, indicate that the improvement of the adequacy index by upgrading the operating system to decentralized systems is obtained 70% and for the centralized automated system is obtained 77%. Accordingly, the reduction in abstracting groundwater from the aquifer for the proposed automation methods are 28.3% and 63.4% respectively. Moreover, the reduction of energy consumption is 21.3% and 71.6%, respectively and the greenhouse gas emission reduction was equal to 23.4 and 70.1 %, respectively.