The Capability of Al-tharthar Canal to Accommodate the Design Discharge

Abstract Book of the 6th World Conference on Climate Change and Global Warming

Year: 2025

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The Capability of Al-tharthar Canal to Accommodate the Design Discharge

Ahmed Danan, Essam Gooda

ABSTRACT:

The Al-Tharthar Canal is a 55.0 km long flood escape, extending from the Tigris River in Samarra City to Al-Tharthar Lake in Iraq. During the flood season, water is diverted from the Tigris River through a regulator located at the entrance of the Al-Tharthar canal, where it is released and stored in Al-Tharthar Lake. The first aim of this study is to specify the current discharge capacity to be escaped by the Al-Tharthar canal. The second aim is to determine how far, after some modifications, the canal could achieve or accommodate a design discharge of 8500 m3/s to respond to any expected flood in the Tigris River due to climate change. The study’s third aim is to apply modification methods for critical cross sections to increase the capacity of the Tharthar Canal to pass 13500 m3/s, which is the predicted discharge of the Strategy Study of Water and Land Resources in Iraq for a return period of 500 years. The hydraulic model of HEC RAS software is implemented to study the hydraulic characteristics of the Al-Tharthar Canal. The results of the output model showed that the current discharge capacity of the Al-Tharthar flood escape does not exceed 4500 m3/s. The recent study tried to find out some modifications that can be applied to increase the discharge capacity of the escape canal. Results showed that the best modification can be done at station 11+000 downstream of the entrance regulator by reshaping the existing cross-section. This allowed passing a discharge of 8500 m3/s in the escape canal, and the discharge of 13500m3/s was achieved when dredging the floodplain of the Tharthar canal to Station 12+000.

Keywords: Al-Tharthar, Climate Change, Flood, Hec Ras, Modification, Tigris River