Estimating the Effects of Conservation on Demand During Droughts

A primary goal of drought management is the reduction of water demand through short‐term conservation measures. To accurately judge the effectiveness of these measures, it is necessary to estimate what the demand would have been in the absence of conservation. A daily demand model developed for that purpose is presented in this article. The model uses Almon lags to account for lagged meteorological variables and includes an autoregressive error term. The model is applied in two case studies to estimate baseline demands for comparison with actual demands during the drought of 1986 in the southeastern United States.