Cesar Luis Garcia,Peter Krause,Carlos Marcelo Garcia,Andrés Carlos Ravelo,Wolfgang- Albert Flugel, Centro de Relevamiento y Evaluacion de Recursos Agricolas y Naturales, Facultad de Ciencias Agropecuarias, cesarnon@gmail.com
In Argentina, about three million people depend on water coming from the Córdoba mountain region. A recent increase in population and climate variability has augmented and intensified events of water scarcity with direct social and economic impacts. Moreover, the effects of ongoing land use changes on the basin hydrology are poorly understood and accounted for in current water management planning. To establish an Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) in the region, it is crucial to estimate the water availability during the dry season, the effects of land use changes and to assess drought events. A distributed and continuous hydrological model (J2000) was built to estimate storages and runoff levels of a meso-catchment. Different climate scenarios were evaluated for short term forecast and the effects on water cycle were analyzed based on different simulations. The use of different indexes and scenarios proved to be very useful in understanding how different drought periods may have different effects on the hydrology of the San Antonio River Basin.
Keywords: Hydrological model, Drought, Climate scenarios