Estimating the water and heat budget as an indicator for water resources management using an integrated watershed modeling tool

Abstract

A water resources management considering not only water but also heat has become a crucial issue due to limited availability of water resources, increasing water contaminations and ground source heat utilizations. Indicators are useful to manage water resources. Water budget and Heat budget can be one of the major indicators for sustainable water resources management because detecting the disequilibrium of these budgets at an early stage makes it possible to implement effective measures. However, many components required to estimate these budgets in a domain that include the surface and the subsurface are difficult to measure directly, for instance, the water and heat transported by recharge, and the groundwater discharge in a regional watershed scale. An integrated watershed modeling technique allows to represent seamlessly the mass and heat transport behaviors from the surface to the underground in arbitrary temporal and spatial scales. Moreover, a spatiotemporal water flow behavior can be expressed without any explicit conditions for routing the paths of water movement. Therefore, this kind of modeling technique becomes efficient tool to estimate the components of these budgets.