Decision support system for the hydrological management of the Guayas River

Abstract

The Guayas River basin in Ecuador is the largest on the Pacific slope of South America, with an area of 34 500 km2 (12.57 % of the national territory). Within the basin, the Daule-Peripa reservoir constitutes the largest water reserve in the country, guaranteeing water for the consumption of more than eight million people, in addition to irrigation and hydroelectric generation. A Hydrological Decision Support System (SHAD) has been developed to efficiently manage water resources in the Guayas river basin, improve the energy production of hydroelectric plants and provide early warning of floods downstream of the plants. SHAD integrates a real-time data acquisition module, with the hydrological model of tanks in charge of estimating the inflows to the reservoirs on an hourly scale, and the control module on which the managers interact. The hydrological model has been calibrated separately for the Daule-Peripa and Baba basins with hourly data from the period 2019-2021. For the Baba basin, the Nash-Sutcliffe coefficient for validation at daily and hourly scales were 0.77 and 0.71, respectively, as well as 0.62 and 0.49 for Daule-Peripa. The preliminary comparative analysis of the management of the water resources of the basin, carried out since the commissioning of SHAD shows evidence of significant improvements.