Iraq is one of the riparian countries within basins of Tigris-Euphrates Rivers in the Middle East region. The region is currently facing water shortage problems due to the increase of the demand and climate changes. In the present study, average monthly water flow measurements for 15 stream flow gaging stations within basins of these rivers in Iraq with population growth rate data in some of its part were used to evaluate the reality of the current situation and future challenges of water availability and demand in Iraq
Mosul Dam, located on the Tigris River north of Iraq, is experiencing sedimentation problems, especially near the Al-Jazeera pumping station that supplies the irrigation water for the Al-Jazeera project. The sources of the sediment accumulated within the reservoir are from the Tigris River, as well as ten side valleys on both sides of the reservoir.
Mosul Dam is one of the biggest hydraulic structures in Iraq. Its storage capacity is 11.11 × 10 9 m 3 at a maximum operation level of 330 m a.s.l. The dam became operational in 1986 and no survey has been conducted to determine its storage capacity and establish new operational curves since this date. A topographic map of scale 1:50 000 dated 1983 was converted into triangulated irregular network (TIN) format using the ArcGIS program to evaluate the operational curves. Then the reservoir was surveyed in 2011 to establish the reduction in its storage capacity and to develop new operational curves. The results indicated that the reduction in the storage capacity of the reservoir was 14.73%. This implies that the rate of sedimentation within the reservoir was 45.72 × 10 6 m 3 year -1 . These results indicate that most of the sediment was deposited within the upper zone of the reservoir where the River Tigris enters the reservoir.
Reservoirs are usually exposed to sediment accumulation problems that will lead to reduction in their storage capacity. This problem directly affects the performance of the dams and causes shortage of their useful life. The simplest technique to estimate sediment deposition rate is using sediment rating curve with sediment trapping efficiency (TE) of the reservoir. Many empirical and semi-empirical approaches have been suggested for to determine this term depending on the annual inflow rate, reservoir characteristics and features of the catchments area. In this study six different empirical methods depending on the residence time principle (water retention time) were used. These approaches were reviewed and applied to determine TE of Mosul dam reservoir (MDR) for period 1986 to 2011. The monthly operating data for inflow, outflow and water elevations for MDR were used to determine monthly TE and long-term TE for whole period of MDR using the mentioned methods. Furthermore, the monthly inflow rate for River Tigris upstream MDR, its sediment rating curve and sediment feeding from valleys around MDR were used to estimate the amount sediment coming to the reservoir. The results provided by these methods for TE with sediment coming to MDR were used to compute the amount of sediment deposited in MDR on monthly bases during this period. The results obtained were evaluated using observed bathymetric survey data that had been collected in 2011 after 25 years of the operation of the dam. The results showed all the mentioned methods gave convergent results and they were very close to bathymetric survey results for estimating the volume of sediment deposited especially that proposed by Ward which gave 0.368% percentage error. Furthermore, the result computed using monthly TE gave good agreement if compared with that long-term TE where the percentage error was ranging between −3.229% to 1.674% for monthly adopted data and −4.862% to −2.477% for I. E. Issa et al. 191 whole period data. It is believed that this work will help others to use this procedure on other reservoirs.
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