An-Najah Staff

The availability of adequate water of appropriate quality has become a limiting factor for development, worldwide. In arid and semi-arid regions, where water scarcity is a dominant problem, the overexploitation of natural water resources threatens to deteriorate the availability of these scarce water resources. The situation has worsened further owing to the increasing population and the associated expansion of agriculture activities imposing a tremendous strain on the limited water resources. This paper aims to set the best surface water management options for the Faria catchment. Faria catchment (320 km2), located in the northeastern part of the West Bank, Palestine, is characterized as arid to semi-arid region. The annual water balance for the Faria catchment indicated that the catchment has a water deficit under the current conditions of about 2 MCM and the situation will be worst with the inevitable growing water demands and hydrologically limited and uncertain supplies. By 2015, it is expected that the annual water deficit will be increase up to 4.5 MCM. Availability of surface water in the catchment is considered comparing to other catchments in the region. Besides to the direct runoff, the baseflow in catchment has a substantial amount. This is due to the 11 fresh water springs that form the baseflow in the Faria catechumen. To assess the availability of direct runoff, an up to date process-oriented and physically-based distributed rainfall-runoff model (coupled TRAIN-ZIN) has been applied. The TRAIN-ZIN model was used to evaluate some of the proposed surface water management options. Analysis shows that there is a potential for additional quantities of surface water (4 MCM) in the catchment to be utilized. Thus it is essential to set a proper surface water management options to save water to be used in dry periods where the gap between demand and supply is comparatively high. This has induced the motivation for developing a set of best management options to optimally manage the surface water in the Faria catchment as a necessary step to develop its scarce water resources and to bridge the supply-demand gap. This paper looks at management tools to set the framework for decision-making in regard of efficient practices that can be adopted to manage the scarce water resources in the catchmen