TRANSIENT RESPONSE FUNCTIONS FOR CONJUNCTIVE WATER MANAGEMENT IN THE SNAKE RIVER PLAIN, IDAHO¹

Abstract

Increasing demands on western water are causing a mounting need for the conjunctive management of surface water and ground water resources. Under western water law, the senior water rights holder has priority over the junior water rights holder in times of water shortage. Water managers have been reluctant to conjunctively manage surface water and ground water resources because of the difficulty of quantification of the impacts to surface water resources from ground water stresses. Impacts from ground water use can take years to propagate through an aquifer system. Prediction of the degree of impact to surface water resources over time and the spatial distribution of impacts is very difficult. Response functions mathematically describe the relationship between a unit ground water stress applied at a specific location and stream depletion or aquifer water level change elsewhere in the system. Response functions can be used to help quantify the spatial and temporal impacts to surface water resources caused by ground water pumping. This paper describes the theory of response functions and presents an application of transient response functions in the Snake River Plain, Idaho. Transient response functions can be used to facilitate the conjunctive management of surface and ground water not only in the eastern Snake River Plain basin, but also in similar basins throughout the western United States.

Decision support for water policy: a review of economic concepts and tools

“…Prior appropriation law assigns water rights to the first person who takes it from the stream and puts it to beneficial use, which is typically interpreted as any use that avoids flagrant waste. While riparian law views all water right holders as having essentially equal legal use rights, prior appropriation creates a system of priorities in which the first user has superior rights over later-comers (Cosgrove & Johnson, 2004). Historically, the first person to divert water for irrigation, mining, or other beneficial use had a senior water right.…”

Mason Valley Groundwater Model: Linking Surface Water and Groundwater in the Walker River Basin, Nevada1

“…The component of the overall investigation discussed here is focused on the nature of groundwater and surface water exchange along the river and consumptive use by groundwater pumping and evapotranspiration (ET) in Mason Valley, an intensively irrigated agricultural basin adjacent to the Walker River. Past research of conjunctive management of hydrologically connected surface water and groundwater resources has relied on response functions, which have been used in the development of steady‐state management zones (Cosgrove and Johnson, 2005), as well as transient functions capable of estimating both continuous and pulse impacts of groundwater pumping on river resources (Cosgrove and Johnson, 2004). Eigenvalue techniques are also available (Sahuquillo, 1983) and have been successfully applied to confined systems (Anreu and Sahuquillo, 1987) and linearized‐unconfined systems by assuming a time‐invariant transmissivity.…”

Explicit algebraic influence coefficients: a one-dimensional transient aquifer model

“…Consequently, it should be intrinsic to the system and only needs to be computed once, independently of the type of the excitation/response. In this way, when multiple forward code executions are presented, as in the context of groundwater management problems (Gorelick, 1983;Illangasekare & Morel-Seytoux, 1982;Loáiciga, 2004;Cosgrove & Johnson, 2004), or while dealing with inverse problems (Yeh, 1986), the use of the influence coefficients approach (when applicable) generates a great saving in computational time. …”