Drainage water use options for a regional irrigation system

The use of saline drainage water for irrigation is a management practice that results in fresh water savings and also addresses the problem of drainage water disposal. However, environmental and economic restrictions need to be considered in order to design a sustainable system. An optimisation routine is proposed here that aims to estimate the quantities of drainage water that could be used for irrigation. The proposed routine incorporates crop–water production functions to simulate a crop's performance under a saline environment. The area of implementation was the regional irrigation network of Agoulinitsa in western Greece, a coastal region with a shallow aquifer. Scenarios under different prices of fresh water and salinity values of drainage water were examined.