Effective water management in the Mahaweli reservoir system : analyzing the inflow of the upmost reservoir

Mahaweli cascaded reservoir system is built contiguous to the Mahaweli river, enhancing the water storage and transferring ability to reinforce the needs of water in accordance with the climatic changes. The foremost requirement of the system is to provide water for irrigation and to produce hydroelectricity to the country that has given rise to conflicting demands of water requirements from the two sectors. Forecasting future water availability is crucial to predict the hydroelectricity generation capacity while maintaining a balance between the provisions of water to both sectors. Therefore, modeling the changes of in-flow of the upmost reservoir is substantial to effective water management. Literature has not revealed much evidence for an existence of an accepted statistical model in predicting the inflow, of the system considered. This research is based on the methodologies to test for the seasonality, stochasticity and non-linearity of the in-flow, in advance to fitting a suitable model.