2015 Volume 25 Issue 3 Pages 121-124
The agriculture along Senegal River, especially on the right bank of Mauritanian territory side, depends on the flood inundation. The recession agriculture that uses the flood plain of the river after inundation is traditional style but gives unstable productivity. In addition, catastrophic damages on the farm field are given in the big rainy years. The authors propose that Lake R’kiz, the dry lake located on the right bank of Senegal River can be used as the retention pond for flood control and water reservoir for the agriculture in dry season. In this study, we tried to simulate the inundation on the flood plain under the current river system as a first step. Based on this numerical simulation model, the construction of the cannel from Senegal River to R’kiz Lake will be considered in further study. The digital elevation model (DEM) of the flood plain of the study site from upper Podor to Dhiama dam was obtained from the free database of Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTM). The hydrological data used as the boundary condition on Dhiama dam and Podor are the observed data in 1999 when there was a big flood. iRIC that solves the 2 dimensional shallow water flow equation was applied to those conditions and result of the simulation was evaluated by the comparison with the water surface area estimated by satellite image analysis. The simulation result and satellite image analysis do not show the perfect agreement because of the assumptions for the unknown conditions of the river channel and hydraulic effect of Guier Lake on Senegal territory.
