Surface Water Resources

 for

Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico.

Analysis of the Sonora River

 

Jose M. Güereña

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                   Objective.

 

My principal objective on doing this project is to use the GIS program to analize the collected data on the state of Sonora and the city of Hermosillo, and be able to reach some conclusions from it. The objective of the project is to make an analysis of the Rio Sonora and its watershed, so we can see how much surface water is available for the city of Hermosillo.

 

 

                        Introduction.

 

Now on this days, water resources has become a very important issue of every community in the world, and of course, Hermosillo is no exception. The high temperatures and low precipitation that exist in the zone, makes this problem even worst, to the point that even building a desalinization plant was considering.

 

                   In this project, I pretend to study the water resources for the city of Hermosillo. I will center my attention in surface water, knowing that Hermosillo also uses groundwater. This should give me a good approximation, because the surface water of the watershed also recharges the ground water that Hermosillo uses.

 

                   The river that supplies water to Hermosillo, is the Sonora river, wish is divided upstream from the city in the Sonora and San Miguel rivers, wish are the center of the studies for this project.

 

                   Part of the data was collected from the internet, like the DEM, the different political maps used, the rivers in Mexico, some precipitation diagrams and general data for the city of Hermosillo (Population, Area, Temperature, Altitude, etc).

 

                   The other part of the data is from the Mexican government, that data consist in monitoring points, that measure parameters like the flow in the rivers, precipitation among another things. This data consist of monthly observations and range from 1937 to 1995, depending on the monitoring point.

 

                   Using this data and the GIS program, I will find the watershed that captures the water that goes to Hermosillo, the rivers that are in it (Sonora river), the monitoring points of interest, parameters like flow of the Sonora river, Precipitation, return periods for rains and droughts and durations of those, time series, etc. The procedures and findings will be discussed in another section.

 

 

                   Description and location of Hermosillo.

 

                   Hermosillo is located at the northwest of Mexico, in the middle of the state of Sonora (see picture), the exact location of the city is at 110º57’00’’ W and 29º05’00’’ N. It has a population of 550 000 habitants.

 

Location of Hermosillo. In this picture you can see the location of Hermosillo in the Sonora state. The location of Texas is also in the map, so you can judge better where is this city.

 

 

 

 

                   As I said before, Hermosillo is located at a desert zone, with mean monthly temperatures that reaches above 32 centigrade degrees and maximums that passes 48 centigrade degrees for the hottest months of the year.

 

                   The low precipitation that exist in the zone, plays a big role in the concern for water resources. Below is showed a precipitation diagram for the zone that includes Sonora state:

 

 Precipitation map. This picture indicates the precipitation in millimeters per year for the northwest of Mexico. The dot that you see is the city of Hermosillo.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                   Sample of the landscape you will find

                   near Hermosillo city.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Description of the project.

 

                   Data.

 

The first part of the project was to collect all the possible data that I needed.

 

From the internet I got:

·        30 m DEM for the zone of Sonora and parts of neighbor states.

·        Several political maps of Mexico, that included the states and cities (geographic coordinates).

·        Map of rivers and Water bodies of Mexico (geographic coordinates).

·        A precipitation map for the northwest of Mexico (geographic coordinates).

·        General information for the city of Hemosillo, including parameters like total population, Area, Temperature, Altitude, etc.

 

And I also got a lot of monitoring points with information about flow in rivers and precipitation mostly. All of this data is in a monthly format, the oldest monitoring points are from 1937 and the duration of the data could be from 10 to 60 years, depending of each one. The database that I had corresponds to the northwest region of Mexico.

 

                   I have to give thanks to Carlos Patino, who helped me get a lot of information.

 

 

Procedure and Analysis:

 

                   Note: I am only going to describe the most significant and successful procedures, in some of these steps I had to carry out several “sub-steps”, and of course there where a lot of difficulties and unsuccessful attempts, but there is no point showing that.

 

 

 

From the political map of Mexico and the river map, I got the State of Sonora, the city of Hermosillo and the rivers in Sonora.

 

 

 

 

 

 

                  

 

From the DEM I got the watersheds and the rivers that give water to the city of Hermosillo.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The next step was cutting the rest of the information that I had and leaving only what is inside the Hermosillo watersheds. Examples:

 

Precipitation in the Hermosillo watershed. The left side gets 200-400 mm per year, and the right side gets 400-600 mm per year. The left side is equal to 41% of the watershed, while the right side equals 59%, that would give as an average of 477 mm/year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Contours for the watershed of Hermosillo.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now is time to work with the monitoring points. This data was available in access tables, I converted them to database tables to be able to work with them. Here are the different monitoring points that I use:

 

Hydrometric stations:

 

This is the data in the first table for one of the 70 different locations included:

 

CVE_ESTHID

NOMBRE

LATITUDE

LONGITUDE

CVE_REGADM

REG_ADMINI

CVE_REGHID

REG_HIDROL

CVE_SUBREG

SUBREGION

CVE_ESTADO

08007

IMURIS

30.75500

-110.88900

02

NOROESTE

08

SONORA NORTE

 

 

26

 

ESTADO

CVE_MUNICI

MUNICIPIO

CVE_CUENCA

CUENCA

CVE_SUBCUE

SUBCUENCA

EST_FISICO

FEC_INIOPE

FEC_ULTDAT

GAS_MAXPER

GAS_MINPER

GAS_MEDPER

SONORA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JUL 1969

DIC 1992

1500.00000

0.00000

2.06214

 

 

                   The next table for the hydrometric station is:

CVE_ESTHID

DATE

VOL_ESCURR

Q_MAXIMO

Q_MINIMO

Q_MEDIO

08007

1/1/1970

0.00000

0.00000

0.00000

0.00000

08007

2/1/1970

349.27000

1.23700

0.00000

0.14400

08007

3/1/1970

765.30000

0.54700

0.00000

0.28600

08007

4/1/1970

0.00000

0.00000

0.00000

0.00000

08007

5/1/1970

0.00000

0.00000

0.00000

0.00000

08007

6/1/1970

0.00000

0.00000

0.00000

0.00000

08007

7/1/1970

2143.63000

26.32000

0.00000

0.80000

08007

8/1/1970

6082.14000

58.40000

0.19100

2.27100

08007

9/1/1970

2259.43000

14.20000

0.00000

0.87200

08007

10/1/1970

56.62000

0.15900

0.00000

0.02100

08007

11/1/1970

561.41000

0.25700

0.13600

0.21700

08007

12/1/1970

766.64000

0.47900

0.22900

0.28600

 

There are over 15000 diferent measurements, I just include data for one year of 1 station.

 

 

The third and last table for the hydrometric station is the next one:

 

CVE_ESTHID

ANIO

VOLESC_ENE

…..

VOLESC_DIC

VOLESC_ANU

QMAX_ENE

…..

QMAX_DIC

QMAX_ANU

QMIN_ENE

…..

QMIN_DIC

QMIN_ANU

QMED_ENE

…..

QMED_DIC

QMED_ANU

08007

1970.00000

0.00000

 

766.64000

12984.44000

0.00000

 

0.47900

101.59900

0.00000

 

0.22900

0.55600

0.00000

 

0.28600

4.89700

 

 

                   There is some data like this for the weather stations, but instead flow the weather stations measured precipitation. That data won’t be included on this report, but it is used in the project.

 

                   The next step is to input the tables whit the geographic location into arcmap and select the stations that are inside the Hermosillo watershed, and from those ones, select those that are important for the project, because some of those stations measure the flow of water channels downstream from Hermosillo, so they are nor important. See figure.

 

 

Location of the hydrological (red) and weather (green) stations used in the project.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                   Analyzing the Hydrometric stations data, we found the next resoults:

 

 

Minimum flow water per year is 16.5 millions of cubic meters, while the maximum is 346.3. As you can see, there is a huge difference in the total water that carries the river, depending on wish year we want to look at.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                   In this pictures you can see the difference from when the river is has a lot of water and when it has no water. The firs picture was taken in 1983, you can see in the last graph that 1983 is the year of maximum total flow for the Sonora river.

 

The maximum flow that the river has ever had is 1497 cubic meters per second, and a minimum of 0.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The precipitation in the watershed is also obtained from the weather stations, giving us an average of 411.68 mm/year. Which is a little bit different than the result that I got from the rain map (477 mm/year) that obviously isn’t that exact.