The operation of a new irrigation canal system in central Arizona is described. Water is relatively expensive, and thus farmers pressure the irrigation district to improve delivery service and keep water losses to a minimum. The system was designed and constructed to function with supervisory (remote‐manual) control, with the potential for automatic (remote‐computer) control. Experiences with hardware and software difficulties are described. While water control and delivery service are currently very good, further improvements through automation are possible. Real‐world operating conditions are described that are somewhat different from the assumptions made for the development of canal‐control algorithms. Field data collection and canal‐flow computer simulation were used to develop a test case for developers of automatic control algorithms. A set of canal‐control performance measures is suggested. For the conditions studied, upstream manual control performed better than a simple local downstream controller.
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Clemmens et al. (1994) studied this question.