Lakes Management in Umbria Region, Central Italy

This paper will show the main features of a mathematical model developed for the water resource management of volumes stored in natural and artificial lakes. Water resources management in a multipurpose scenario always represents an interesting issue, also because in Mediterranean countries water contributions to river basins are currently becoming more and more concentrated in short wet periods followed by longer periods of drought. These meteorological conditions led many countries, including Italy, to build several artificial reservoirs originally intended to supply agricultural uses. Lately, those reservoirs have been used more and more to satisfy several other water demands, such as municipal uses, hydroelectric uses as well as environmental uses. More over, these new demands, related to a multipurpose use of the water resource stored in reservoirs, brought to a competition amongst the various uses during drought periods, and to the need for new management policies and planning tools for the total available resource. These situations concern also the connection between artificial and natural lakes, between the environmental use and other uses. Very interesting study cases are the Trasimeno, Montedoglio and Casanova lakes in Umbria region. The Trasimeno is a closed lake, it has an orogenetic origin and no natural effluent, besides this, its level has long term oscillations related to the meteoric contributions over its limited catchment. The link with others two artificial lakes (Montedoglio and Casanova) has been studied and simulated to solve the environmental and water use problems in drought periods.