Testing of Water Evaluation and Planning (WEAP) model for water resources management in the Hron River basin

The assessment of water resources and the availability of water in river basins is one of the main tasks enabling efficient water management. One of the bases for the Water Plan of the Slovak Republic is a retrospective water management balance of the amount of surface water in Slovakia, which compares the requirements for water with the usable amount of water. As part of the efforts to improve the plan, the possibility of modelling the water management balance of surface waters using appropriate software for the integrated planning of water resources was outlined. The Water Evaluation and Planning (WEAP) software was selected to test this modelling according to the current methodology. In the Hron river basin, a time series in a monthly time step of data input in the period 2000–2019 was selected. The focus was on the compatibility of the current methodology of the water management balance and methods of modelling it in the WEAP software. The output is a river basin model capable of producing outputs above the level of the original processing of the water management balance, while the compilation of the graphic and data structure of the modelled river basin is fully automated, mainly by using command lines. This modelling approach has shown that, thanks to the possibility of creating new variables within the data structure, it is possible to achieve the required level of compatibility with the set methodology for water management balances. The results demonstrate that the WEAP could be an easy-to-use model building tool for the optimal and successful development, planning and forecasting of water management in space and over time in Slovakia.