Water supply drought is where a shortage of rainfall causes water companies concern about supplies for their customers. Central to drought management will be decisions made about quantities of water to abstract (from a range of different sources), for storage or for allocation to different water users.
Water resources simulation models (WRSM) can simulate abstractions, stores (including groundwater), transfers, the consumption of water and return flows. They can also be used to represent current or potential rules and arrangements for managing water resources.
In MaRIUS we have improved on existing WRSMs to provide capability to model the potential for, and robustness of, more sophisticated water allocation and management arrangements during droughts. This provides information on the probability of water shortages for different users under given management strategies, and allows us to test a wide range of water abstraction, allocation and transfer strategies before and during droughts and during drought recovery.