REVIEW OF WATER RESOURCES JOURNAL

Crisis of Water Resources on the Ulan Buh Desert Oases, Inner

Mongolia, China - A Case Study of Dengkou County
By Meng Zhong-Ju, Gao Yong, Yu Yi and Ren Xiao-Meng

MAJORING WATER RESOURCES ENGINEERING

ENGINEERING FACULTY
BRAWIJAYA UNIVERSITY
MALANG
2013

Introduction and background

Hetao Plain, composed of hundreds of oases, is one of the most important grain-producing
areas in China. Most crops, especially wheat and corn, depend on irrigation, thus water
availability is a key issue for grain productivity on this land.
The Yellow River is the main water source for irrigation and a crisis of water resources for
agricultural use occurs because
of increasingly reduced river flows and water-using competition with industry and
human residential use.We found that the oasis in Dengkou county was short of water
resources with a water deficit rate
of 5.14% in 2010. Based on the trend of the data, water deficit will continue to
increase as the population grows in the
future. Water resource is a limiting factor to agricultural development in this region
and proper management of water use
and strategies for water resource conservation are urgently needed. Especially, based
on our results we suggest that
current irrigation methods need to be greatly improved to save the water that was lost
from evaporation.

China has so large arid area, its about 1/4 of the countrys total territory. Its
important to conserve and make this arid land to be a useful area, which is crucial to Chinas
agricultural and industrial development with increasing population.
Ulan Buh Desert is one of the arid areas. It has hundreds of oases which support
millions of people. Its located in the southwest of the Hetao Plain.
Water supply in the Hetao Oasis includes surface water and groundwater, and the
surface water primarily comes from Yellow River water diversion (Wy). The groundwater
utilization coefficient is expressed by (0.9). The utilization quantity is expressed as: Wa=
WG-We (WG is groundwater and We is water consumption via evaporation). The available
water resource (W) is expressed as W=Wa+Wy. Based on the calculation form the formula
above, the groundwater and total water resources mainly were from water diversion of the
Yellow River.
Human uses water in a variety of ways and has introduced new components to the
water consumption cycle in the desert oasis. Based on our investigation and data available,
there are 2 major use of water resource on the oasis, the first one is for production
(agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry and industry) and the second is for peoples
livelihood.
*Water resource supply and demand
In order to provide information for improving water use efficiency and meeting socioeconomic development needs, we analyzed the balance of water supply and demand. As
shown in Table 2, water resources were used mainly for agricultural irrigation (5.99108
m3), accounting for 95% of the total use. Total water demand is 6.34108 m3, while water
supply is 6.03108 m3. Water deficit is 0.31108 m3 and water deficit rate is 5.14%.
Water potential bearing capacity determines the desert agricultural irrigation
development scale, so it is necessary to estabilsh a water-saving agricultural system. With
proper methods and technologies of irrigation, we could significantly reduce water loss from
the unnecessary evaporation and thus increase the efficiency of water resource utilization.
Regarding the water resources balance, we analyzed the relationship between water saving
rate and water potential bearing capacity under 3 frequencies. When the irrigation water
saving rate increase, the expanded irrigation area also increased. After saving water irrigation,
water potential bearing capacity was expressed as the ratio of expanded irrigation area to

original irrigation area. The results were shown in Figs. 4-6. There existed a nonlinear
relationship between the water saving rate (x) and bearing capacity (y) (Figs. 4-6).