Implementación del modelo WEAP (Water Evaluation and Planning System) a la cuenca del río Apulo para la determinación de la disponibilidad hídrica de la cuenca bajo escenarios de cambios en usos del suelo.

Abstract

The degree work consisted in the application of the hydrological model WEAP (Water Evaluation and Planning) to the Apulo river basin in order to evaluate the performance of the tool to represent the hydrological behavior of the basin and perform the representation of different scenarios of changes in land use and their effect on the water availability of the basin. The model that was represented estimates the flows generated in each Hydrological Analysis Unit (HU) as the result of subtracting from the effective precipitation (percentage of total precipitation) what is consumed by evapotranspiration (calculated as the crop coefficient by the evapotranspiration of reference estimated by the Hargreaves equation) and by the demands of the basin. Based on information from hydroclimatological stations in the area, the model was calibrated to estimate the cultivation coefficient and the percentage of effective precipitation for each type of cover, obtaining good performance of the model in terms of the flows that it simulates compared with the measured at La Esperanza station (PBIAS of 3% and NSE of 0.87). Three scenarios of changes in land cover were represented, decreasing pasture cover and replacing in each scenario by heterogeneous agricultural areas, urban areas and planted forests, where a decrease in the flows generated by the basin was evidenced, which was due to the conditions of mathematical modeling and may not represent the physical and hydrological response of the basin.