Agriculture is a significant user of water resources in Europe, accounting for around 30 per cent of total water use. Because water is essential to plant growth, irrigation is essentially to overcome deficiencies in rainfall for growing crops. Irrigation is a basic determinant of agriculture because its inadequacies are the most powerful constraints on the increase of agricultural production. Irrigation was recognized for its protective role of insurance against the vagaries of rainfall and drought. But the irrigation, besides the positive effects, has a significant environmental impact. The environmental impacts of irrigation are variable and not well-documented; some environmental impacts can be very severe. The main types of environmental impact arising from irrigation appear to be: water pollution from nutrients and pesticides; damage to habitats and aquifer exhaustion by abstraction of irrigation water; intensive forms of irrigated agriculture displacing formerly high value semi-natural ecosystems; gains to biodiversity and landscape from certain traditional or ‘leaky’ irrigation systems in some localized areas; increased erosion of cultivated soils on slopes; salinization, or contamination of water by minerals, of groundwater sources; both negative and positive effects of large scale water transfers, associated with irrigation projects. Minor irrigation schemes within a catchment will normally have negligible influence on the catchment hydrology, unless transfer of water over catchment boundaries is involved. Large irrigation schemes may significantly affect the runoff and the groundwater recharge through local increases in evapotranspiration and infiltration as well as through operational and field losses. To study the some effects of irrigation can be used advanced hydroinformatic tools, like MIKE11 by DHI, Rainfall – Runoff module, NAM methods. NAM method is a lumped, conceptual rainfall-runoff model, simulating the overland-, inter- flow, and base-flow components as a function of the moisture contents in four storages. The irrigation module of NAM may be applied to describe the effect of irrigation on the following aspects: the overall water balance of the catchment; local infiltration and groundwater recharge in irrigated areas; the distribution of catchment runoff amongst different runoff components (overland flow, interflow, base flow). This paper present and analyze the irrigation influence on catchment hydrology modeling with advanced hydroinformatic tools. It is performed and a case study, regarding to modeling these influences with MIKE11 software.

irrigation, hydrology, modelling, hydroinformatic tools

Presentation: poster