Banca de DEFESA: ANA RUTE BATISTA PEREIRA

ESTIMATION OF EVAPORATION IN SURFACE WATER RESERVOIRS: A CHALLENGE IN WATER RESOURCES MANAGEMENT

Water Resources Management; Water Security; Stochastic hydrology; Evaporation; Evapotranspiration.

The evaporation process of surface water reservoirs is considered a loss due to the significant volume of water that passes into the atmosphere, and it is important to measure such losses both in the project preparation phase and throughout the reservoir's operating period. The difficulty in obtaining evaporation values poses a major challenge for the management of water resources, especially in arid and semi-arid regions, such as the Lima Campos Reservoir, located in the municipality of Icó - CE, in the Salgado River sub-basin. . Statistical-computational tools emerge as great allies in the study, characterization and solution of practical problems in the area of water resources, mainly to optimize time and minimize errors. In this way, two theoretical methods of estimating evaporation were applied, using the Penman-Montheith (PM FAO-56) and Hargreaves evapotranspiration equations. The standard evaporation series used for comparison was the climatological normal, the same adopted by SAGREH - Support System for Water Resources Management. It was concluded that there was no significant difference between the evaporation series generated by the PM FAO-56 method and the normal climatological evaporation, however it was possible to see a greater sensitivity of the PM FAO-56 method to atypical climate changes. The Hargreaves method overestimated the values in relation to the climatological normal in most of the series.