Rainwater storage for Colombia's rural areas.: Hydraulic engineering in Mexico

Owing to its geographical position and topographical characteristics, Colombia has a great availability of water Paradoxically, a large percentage of the rural population experience water supply shortages, mainly because of quantity and quality problems. It is therefore important to consider a methodology through which rainfall could become either a direct source of water or a complement to other water supply systems. This technical note proposes a methodology based on adimensional curves which relates percentages of the multi-annual daily mean precipitation to the volume of required storage, for several confidence levels, which is related to the number of days accepted on failure (without supplying demand). The slope of these curves goes downward and the places where the greatest gradients take place are taken into account for the system's optimal configuration, as financial efficiency turns sensitive to such changes.