Back to Hydrology,
water resources and water pollution
by Mr. Frank Farnum, Chief
Hydrologist, Caribbean
Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology (CIMH). (The
article was originally published in The 25th Anniversary Publication of the
Caribbean Meteorological Institute, 1992.)
Clean air and clean water are the two basic requirements for
a healthy life. The science of
meteorology deals with the atmosphere and is based on the physical laws
governing it. The science of
hydrology is the science which deals with water.
Most people have some idea of what meteorology is, admittedly in varying
degrees, but few comprehend what hydrology is.
Many people in the Caribbean and that include not only the
man in the street but academics as well, have a vague concept of what hydrology
really is and what the practitioners of hydrology – the hydrologists do.
The question I hear so often when I mention to the public
that hydrology plays a prominent role in the Caribbean Meteorological Institute
is. “What is hydrology and what do hydrologists do?” When told that at the Caribbean Meteorological
Institute/Caribbean Operational Hydrology Institute, (CMI/COHI) the hydrology
section is involved in geophysical investigations, flood estimation, regional
analyses, hydro power assessment, location of sites for drilling water wells,
road drainage and water quantity and quality throughout the Caribbean.
The reply is “very interesting. I
didn’t know that you people do those things.”
Hydrology is all those things and much more.
It is the science that treats all the waters of the earth, their
occurrence, circulation and distribution, their chemical and physical properties
and their reaction with their environment.
With such a definition everything from designs for major water supply
projects and assessment of hydro-electric power generation schemes to small
investigations such as the sizing of water traps for a golf course and
estimating the probability of a certain intensity of rainfall being equaled or
exceeded in a given year falls within the ambit of hydrology.
The training programme of COHI in hydrology is unique in the
English speaking developing world drawing students from as far as Africa.
Ten years have now passed and 100 students have been trained in
hydrology. 15% have been women.
This percentage of women needs to be increased.
Some funding agencies are encouraging the enrollment of women in the
hydrology courses but in order for this to happen water resources agencies will
have to recruit women who have the requisite academic background.
Targeting of girls in secondary school for careers in water resources has
to be done. Of the students
trained, 71% have remained in the water resources sector.
As a follow-up to the training obtained at the Institute,
operational fieldwork in the countries must increase. Countries have to take responsibility in maintaining their
hydrometric networks and in building up their national hydrological data banks.
Without well maintained stations and adequate data banks, they will never
be able to design their water projects effectively and efficiently.
CMI/COHI can greatly assist countries but the Institution has
to be involved from the inception stage and not only, when at final design stage
consultants, having little or no data, want their queries answered.
This has to be done if the expertise of CMI/COHI is to be used and thus
avert the serious errors of the past, due to conclusions which are arrived at by
incorrect transformations and analyses based on spurious data.
The basic right of our Caribbean peoples is to have easy
access to clean water at an affordable price.
The failure to recognize that water has an economic value has led to
wasteful and damaging uses of that resource.
Owing to the meteorology and geomorphology of Caribbean countries, there
is a high variable seasonal and spatial occurrence of adequate amounts of water
for domestic, agriculture and hydro-power needs.
With a high demand being placed now and in the future on the
water resources in the Caribbean, it is imperative that national water resources
authorities or some such central agencies be set up to conserve and manage all
the water resources of the individual states and rationalize the use of water
with competing interests. The
questions which need to be answered concern priorities in allocation of water
for various uses (1) domestic supply (2) irrigation water (3) hydroelectric
power generation and (4) industrial use.
Some of the larger countries are known to have adequate
reserves up to the year 2000, but it is becoming clear that with the increased
demand being placed on the water utility services, for the provision of adequate
supplies of water by an increasing population and growing industrial sector,
that those countries will be stretched to the limit to provide good services.
Running short of useable water after the year 2000 is quite possible, if
prudent management of the quantity and quality of Caribbean countries water
resources is not started immediately.
Our people must be made aware of these facts, and really be
concerned about the nature of water resource.
Too often, at the present time in most Caribbean countries, the laws
concerning preservation of catchments are being flouted by the establishment of
unauthorized settlements and the encroachment of farming on lands declared as
“protected zones and restricted areas”.
The disgusting habit of illegal dumping of garbage in gullies, ghuts, and
streams continues and if this does not cease, sooner rather than later the water
supply will be polluted. We all must be “environment friendly”.
We only have one world in which to live.
The running short of usable water will result from the
overloading of the very fragile system by people more than any future global
warming and climate change. Of that
there is no doubt. It is naive to
think otherwise. There has been
change in the past and there will be change in the future.
It is wise to accept, however, that even though change of the environment
is inevitable, there has been a balance which was maintained.
This is what has prevented irretrievable damage to the environment.
All people have the responsibility to keep that balance now and sustain
it in the future.
In the world of science, when conclusions are arrived at,
they are stationary, consistent and homogeneous. This is specifically so in engineering studies of water
resources development and management. In
the developed countries, great care is taken in maintaining hydrometric networks
and in some places in Europe 80 to 100 years of streamflow data are available.
In the Eastern Caribbean the longest data set for streamflow is four
years (in 1992).
Minimum length hydrological databases are not going to be
available for the small Caribbean countries until well after year 2000 and this
is assuming that the automatic recording rain gauges and water level recorders
are kept in working order or replaced in the next ten to 15 years.
There are worrying signs already as smaller and smaller amounts of
reliable data are received in the computer data bank HYDATA at CMI/COHI.
The databases which classical hydrology says ought to be 30 years in
lengths are now only three or four years in the case of eastern Caribbean
countries.
By 2010 the streamflow databases would not have reached 20
years in length. Rainfall databases
are much better, where length is concerned for monthly and in some cases daily
data. When one examines rainfall
data at time spans less than one day the situation is quite alarming.
There is the startling discovery that there is much less data received
now than twenty years ago. It is these short duration rainfall amounts that are so
important to the hydrologist in setting up the rainfall-run off models and
making frequency analyses.
Beyond the year 2000, the first challenge for the hydrologist
will be how to provide the hydrological designs, which will be demanded by
planners and engineers from the analyses of short data sets.
The second challenge will be, how to deal with governments who because of
hard economic times do not find it possible to place enough funds to the water
resources agencies to maintain the hydrological network and increase the
complement of needed staff. This action will result in unreliable data being placed in
data banks and this would affect the results of hydrological studies.
The greatest challenge however which governments,
hydrologists and people in the Caribbean will face beyond the year 2000 will be
the way in which they will find the appropriate response strategies to the
challenges presented.
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