Optimal water resources management in the southern Gaza Strip

Dissertant

Barakat, Majdi

Thesis advisor

Rabah, Fahd K. J.
Ghabayen, Said

University

Islamic University

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

Department

Department Environmental Engineering

University Country

Palestine (Gaza Strip)

Degree

Master

Degree Date

2005

English Abstract

Gaza Strip with its continuing water scarcity and limited available resources cannot afford to continue with the present situation through the endemic mismanagement of water resources.

The growing gap between water supply and water demand is calling for the mobilization of any additional conventional and non-conventional water resources.

Pumping from closely spaced wells in the southern governorates of Gaza Strip has resulted in the formation of deep cones of depression in the groundwater table in the vicinity of the pumping centers.

Water-level measurements indicate that there has been a steady decline in the groundwater table level in the vicinity of these pumping centers for the past 20 years.

Israeli authorities have recently evacuated Gaza Strip settlements.

As a result, large areas with good quality water became available to the Palestinian use. Reconfiguration of the water supply systems will then be necessary for optimal utilization of the groundwater resources for the whole area.

The proposed supply redistribution along with the utilization of treated wastewater and the desalination of large quantities of seawater are all considered crucial measures to close the gap between the supply and the demand, relief the stress on the groundwater aquifer, and ensure a long term sustainability of the water resources. As we are faced with a multi-dimensional problem that involved the groundwater system and the overland management system, a combined simulation optimization techniques are used to predict aquifer behavior while simultaneously select the optimal set of management alternatives. Visual Mod Flow (VMF) which is based on a finite-difference code and its integrated modules is used for groundwater flow simulation.

In addition to that a Genetic Algorithms (GA) code is used to search the global optimal set of management alternatives to the water resources in the southern governorates.

The VMF is utilized to define the groundwater system constraints for each planning horizon and to predict the behavior of the aquifer in response to supply reconfiguration.

Based on the resource constraints, the target quality constraints for different users, and the socioeconomic factors the GA select the optimal set of supply alternatives considering all the available conventional and non-conventional options. The results show that supplying part of domestic demand from evenly distributed set of wells in the settlements areas and reducing the production from the current problematic areas will significantly improve the groundwater table level in the area.

The results also shows that in order to satisfy the quality constraints for both domestic and agricultural users, a large quantity of fresh water should be conveyed from outside the aquifer system (i.e.

seawater desalination).

This will improve the quality of domestic supply which in turns improves the quality of the effluent and as a result the reuse of effluent will not be constrained by quality (salinity).

Main Subjects

Earth Sciences, Water and Environment

Topics

• Management
• Water resources
• Palestine
• Gaza Strip

No. of Pages

106

Table of Contents

• APA
• MLA
• AMA

Language

English

Data Type

Arab Theses

Record ID

BIM-300493