Modeling water use in schools: A disaggregation approach

Abstract

Modeling urban water use plays a key role in water resource planning and management. From the literature it was found that a vast amount of research has been conducted on modeling residential water use and limited attention has been given to modeling non-residential urban water use. However, it has significant importance for effective water resources management in any urban area. This study aims to model urban water use in schools in the eastern part of Melbourne. A total number of 375 schools were considered in this study. These schools were first grouped into different categories based on the annual volume of water use. Multiple Linear Regression models were then developed for each of these groups. Model performance was measured using the Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (E). It was found that the developed models have the capacity to estimate water use in schools satisfactorily, achieving E values greater than 0.5 in most cases.

Keywords::

• urban water management
• water use in school
• disaggregation approach

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the valuable statistical support received from Associate Professor Neil Diamond and Dr Fuchun Huang from Victoria University. The authors also like to thank Bureau of Meteorology (Australia) for supplying the climate data for this study. The comments made by anonymous reviewers, Associate Editor and Editor-in-Chief have improved the quality of this paper, and their effort is gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.