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IRRIGATION INDUCED RIVER SALINIZATION

Published by the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, St. Joseph, Michigan www.asabe.org

Citation:  Paper number  701P0304,  . (doi: 10.13031/2013.15720)
Authors:   LAMBERT K SMEDEMA
Keywords:   

Irigation development in river basins in the arid zone has often lead to considerable salinisation of the river water , typically featuring a strong increase in river salinity from the head of the river to the outlet. The underlying processes and mechanisms have been discussed and illustrated for two basins (the Amu Darya basin in Central Asia and the Indus basin in Pakistan). The longitudinal river salinity profiles in these basins are shown to reflect the spatial patterns of the irrigation abstraction and drainage return flows, the land salinsation and the irrigation induced mobilisation of resident salts in the basin. It is conceived that the irrigated induced river salinsation profiles can generally be classified in three generic types, e.i. the salinisation profiles, the equilibrium profiles and mobilisation profiles. For the equilibrium profile, it is analytically derived that this profile may be expected to have an exponential form, which pridiction matches quite well with the observed profiles. Mobilisation type profiles appear to the most common type in the arid zone.

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