SA Waterbulletin September 1991

Abstract

Simulation of surface water flow through an interlinked system of catchments, river reaches, reservoirs and irrigation areas. In 1990 a project to update water resources information for South Africa was initiated by the Water Research Commission. At the outset of this project it was decided that the Pitman Model in its existing form needed to be modified to facilitate calibration of catchments subjects to intensive development. The new version of the model is designed to run on a PC and is of a modular construction, with four different types of module (runoff, channel, reservoir and irrigation) linked by means of arcs to form a network. The modules can be linked in any feasible way to form a complex system. The size of the system that can be simulated at any one time is limited to 30 modules by the 640 kb memory of DOS. Very large systems can be broken down into smaller subsystems and the output from these subsystems stored for later use as inputs to other subsystems downstream.

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