JWSS - Journal of Water and Soil Science

Over the years, since the beginning of the national and infrastructural project of Development and Renovation of Paddy Fields of Iranian Northern provinces, it has been essential to evaluate water distribution and delivery Performance of the project to get its feedback in the pursuit of the desired goals. However, the results of the evaluation of a system can reliable when they are based on quantitative indicators, not on personal opinions and empirical judgment. So, in this study, Total Error (TE) of performance of water delivery system, a statistical indicator, and its component including adequacy, water management capability and equity errors were calculated and compared for two concrete and earthen irrigation canals. This analysis was done based on calculating water demand and measuring the volume of delivered water between outlets during the irrigation season in the paddy fields of Esmaelkola of Joybar city, in 2015. According to the results, although the concrete channel (0.28) had less error than the earthen channel (0.43) and in the concrete channel, as compared to the earthen channel, the share of the components of adequacy and water management capability from the total error was dropped from 47% to less than 10%, but the error in the water delivery of the concrete channel was still high due to the error in the equity of distribution, whose value was 0.25 (90% of the total error). Therefore, in order to reduce the performance error, after channel lining, it would be necessary to make fundamental changes in the intake and flow control structure in addition to the training of irrigators regarding water delivery based on water demand.

Water allocation needs to adhere to the principles of efficiency, equity, and sustainability, but, equity usually is less considered. Foumanat irrigation area with five command areas is one of the three areas of Sefidroud irrigation and drainage network that more than 90% of it is covered by paddy fields. Since water plays a key role in paddy fields, the lack of uniform distribution of water resources throughout the irrigation area during the rice cultivation period causes irrigation water scarcity and severe damage to some irrigation areas. In this study, the equity of groundwater withdrawal and the received surface water from Sefidroud irrigation and drainage canals according to the shared water resources among Foumanat’s command areas were evaluated using the Gini coefficient. Therefore, a water allocation optimization model was developed to maximize the equity in the allocation of groundwater and surface water of canals according to the minimum current economic benefit in the command areas. The results showed that in optimum conditions, the equity of groundwater and surface water resources allocation was increased by 46.3% and 43.7%, respectively. The evaluation of the optimal allocation of available water resources also showed that the amounts of groundwater withdrawal and the received surface water from canals are distributed equally among command areas.