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Testing the compliance of the European water framework directive in the huerva river from the exergy aproach

Abstract:

The European Water Framework Directive (WFD), which came into force in 2000, constitutes a key point to get degraded waters bodies up to a good natural status by 2015. In this way, adequate and cost-effective restoration environmental measures should be entirely written by competent Authorities, by 2009. Physical Hydronomics (PH) was presented in previous ECOS Conferences as an objective tool to calculate and allocate among users the restoration costs of water bodies through the exergy analysis. In this paper, the whole analysis of the Huerva River, a tributary of the Ebro River, the most plentiful stream in Spain, is presented. It was modelled with a specific hydraulic simulation software called AQUATOOL for the period 2002-2007. That software includes both quantitative and qualitative aspects and guarantees a comprehensive study of physico-chemical behaviour of the river, what assure the precise calculation of those above mentioned costs. In addition, an important novelty is presented in this work: the testing of the Programme of Measures proposed for the Huerva River. Results show that the proposed restoration measures are enough to reach the desired objective state of the Huerva waters by 2015. Similar global figures are found by conventional and PH approaches; however, PH presents some relevant advantages such the simplicity of using an only unit (exergy), or allowing to charge the users restoration costs according to degradation on the river provoked by them, as well as providing a more disaggregated and detailed information.