Author(s): Ewan Last; Rae Mackay
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Keywords: No Keywords
Abstract: Global pressures (climate, environment, pollution, energy and population dynamics) are forcing a need to change the way water is managed in future in cities. To meet this need, the SWITCH European Framework VI project is developing simulation tools to assist stakeholder communities to scope future options for integrated urban water management (IUWM). One of the tools being developed is City Water Balance (CWB). This tool allows users to explore a broad range of strategies for future city-level change scenarios and to output indicator information on water demand, quality, energy consumption, and life-cycle cost. CWB is designed as an efficient scoping model. CWB is a daily-timestep conceptual water, energy and quality balance model operating over annual to decadal periods that uses simplified representations of the flows and storages within representative land use areas mapped across a city. Data requirements allow a model to be established relatively quickly from extant spatial mapping. Default descriptions and datasets for individual land uses and water management technologies further facilitate model development. CWB advances previous work of Integrated Urban Water management (IUWM) scoping models such as AQUACYCLE and UVQ in two ways. The first concerns the integration of natural systems more fully into the urban water cycle description (groundwater and surface water bodies are spatially articulated). The second concerns the extension to address energy consumption and production as well as life cycle costs. Application of the model to Birmingham using historical data for verification and validation of the model has been undertaken; the results provide a valuable illustration of the effectiveness of the model.
Year: 2010