In the past two decades, the Northern Tampa Bay region of Florida has encountered tremendous growth in water demands. Tampa Bay Water, the largest wholesale water supply utility in Florida, has been using a deterministic optimisation model since 1999 to manage their interconnected regional wellfields under the optimised regional operations plan (OROP). Since that time, the supply sources have increased to include new groundwater wells, surface water flow withdrawals, regional reservoir, and desalination plant. The new generation of the OROP is an adaptive integrated water resources management model that utilises reliability-based optimisation techniques to generate supply operation schedule weekly. The framework accounts for the uncertainties associated with the prediction of water demands, surface water availabilities, baseline groundwater levels, non-anthropogenic reservoir water budget and hydrogeologic properties. Except for hydrogeologic properties, these uncertainties are partially caused by the variability of future climate conditions. The primary management goal is to satisfy water demands while protecting wetland ecology and preventing seawater intrusion. The speaker will briefly discuss the OROP and how it maximises the reliability of achieving this goal.

Speaker
Dr Bill C M Mok, principal engineer and hydrogeologist of Geomatrix Consultants, Inc.