HERMANA Water Control Room
The Valle del Cauca is situated in the west of Colombia and is the country’s third-largest economy. Sugar cane is an important source of income for the region. However, this crop is heavily reliant on water and, with demand for surface water and groundwater under strain, the challenge for CVC is to ensure the available water is optimally shared among all users. To manage the water resources as effectively as possible, CVC needed a single, integrated decision-support system providing online access to all the relevant information on ground and surface water (quantity and quality), meteorology, floods and so on.
HydroNET Solution
HERMANA (meaning sister in Spanish) is an abbreviation for HERramienta para el MANejo integral del Agua or, in other words, a decision-support system for integrated water management. It provides (1) insight into current and forecast demand for and availability of water, and (2) overviews and advice via dashboards, reports and alerts. Examples include a dashboard showing the water available for the city of Cali, flood forecasts for the River Cauca and a drought dashboard for the CVC area.
The HERMANA platform was implemented by smartly connecting the following 3 existing products:
- The Delft-FEWS Colombia system, which provides access to all relevant weather and water information, models and forecasts from CVC and IDEAM (Colombia’s national hydrology and meteorology service);
- FutureWater’s InfoSequía tool, which provides satellite information-based drought indicators for the entire area;
- HydroNET, which combines the information from InfoSequía and Delft-FEWS Colombia with local knowledge and data from CVC and generates personalised online dashboards and reports tailored to CVC’s information needs.
Thanks to HERMANA, CVC can take the right decisions, explain and reproduce them so as to promote sustainable, open and transparent management of its water resources.
WATERCONNECT
HERMANA is just one of the success stories of WaterCONNECT, a Deltares and HydroLogic initiative focusing on collaboration in a ‘golden triangle’ (knowledge institutes, public and private organisations). By combining forces the WaterCONNECT consortium is helping water managers around the world to set up online, integrated decision-support systems.