Irrigation water use tracking system

Presented during the Third international conference on irrigation and drainage held March 30 - April 2, 2005 in San Diego, California. The theme of the conference was "Water district management and governance."Includes bibliographical references.Across the 13 irrigation districts in the province of Alberta, there is no direct volumetric financial charge attached to water diversions and consumption. Individual water users pay specific and fixed annual rates per unit of irrigation area defined within their respective assessment rolls, regardless of the actual volume of usage. However, as water is becoming a more stressed resource, with increasing competition for limited supplies by a diversity of users, and with greater public call for more accountability on the part of water users, it is becoming increasingly understood that some form of volumetric accountability is warranted. As virtually none of the 10,000-plus water delivery turnouts have any metering facilities whatsoever, it has been necessary to develop some alternative form of water use tracking to compile reasonable records of individual diversions. Even though these volumes of diversion are not currently tied to water use charges, many of the districts have implemented limits on deliveries to individual land parcels. A Water Use Module (WUM) software package has been developed that tracks water use based on the duration of water deliveries to each irrigation system in each field and the respective capacity of each of those systems. This package has recently been up-dated to take advantage of opportunities to interface with the Internet for more real-time, more accurate and more comprehensive irrigation information reporting.Sponsored by USCID; co-sponsored by Association of California Water Agencies and International Network for Participatory Irrigation Management