Balanço hídrico do Reservatório Epitácio Pessoa após a chegada das águas da transposição do Rio São Francisco.

Abstract

Water is an essential resource for life, however, the increase in demand coupled with scarcity, in some regions, end up generating conflicts among many users. In order to mitigate and even solve these issues, the application of good management of the available water resources have to be practiced. An useful tool to assist in the management of water resources is the water balance, which considers all variables that comes in and comes out of the system being analyzed. The present research has analyzed the alteration in the water balance of the Epitácio Pessoa reservoir (Boqueirão) after receiving flows from the Integration Project of the São Francisco River with the Hydrographic Basins of the Northern of the Northeast (PISF), the largest hydroelectric infrastructure in Brazil. It was used Hidro spreadsheet tool which is capable to perform the water balance, computationally, through the insertion of all the informations obtained from the reservoir. This reservoir is located in the Brazilian semiarid region, being of great importance due to it supplies a population larger than half million people, whose nucleus is represented by the city of Campina Grande - PB. The simulations carried out not only observed the probable behavior and impact brought by the project to the water configurations of the region, but also they allowed the generation of a new guarantee curve for the reservoir under study. This curve has provided flows and their respective guarantees of use, including the regularized flow, which allows a knowledge of fundamental importance for decision making. Considering the situation in which the water storage in the Epitácio Pessoa reservoir arrived, the importance of the project of transposition of the São Francisco river for all the population and cities of the region is verified.