Arvin-Edison Water Storage District is comprised of approximately 132,000 acres of prime agricultural land located in the southeasterly portion of the San Joaquin Valley of California and lies entirely within Kern County. Approximately 110,000 acres are developed to irrigated crops, with vineyards, truck crops, potatoes, cotton, citrus, and orchards.
This project included driving the district's efforts to achieve sustainable water supplies for their surface water service area and the groundwater service area using a MODFLOW-6 model by helping visualize the hydrological impacts of water management decisions.
​
My work includes:
-
Developed Python scripts to streamline modeling and data processing workflows for model input file generation.
-
Designed a soil moisture balance model to calculate crop irrigation demand and simulate water movement in the District's major infrastructure consisting of 45 miles of concrete canals, 50 pumping plants with 150 pumps/motors, 1500 acres of spreading basins, 82 groundwater extraction wells.
-
Created spatial input datasets like land use patterns, soil characteristics, aquifer properties, surface water features etc. for the soil moisture model.
-
Developed and calibrated a model using MODFLOW-6 to help quantify and analyze the impact of district operations on the groundwater aquifer.
-
Produced a Decision Support Tool using RShiny based on the model results for the client to help facilitate real-time decisions to drive sustainable water use and climate change preparedness.
