Shatt Al-Hilla was considered one of the important branches of Euphrates River that supplies irrigation water to millions of dunams of planted areas. It is important to control the velocity and water level along the river to maintain the required level for easily diverting water to the branches located along the river. So, in this research, a numerical model was developed to simulate the gradually varied unsteady flow in Shatt AL-Hilla. The present study aims to solve the continuity and momentum (Saint-Venant) equations numerically to predict the hydraulic characteristics in the river using Galerkin finite element method. A computer program was designed and built using the programming language FORTRAN-77. Fifty kilometers was considered starting from downstream of Hindiyah Barrage towards Hilla City. The gathered field measurements along different periods were used for the purpose of calibration and verification of the model. The results show that the suitable Manning roughness was 0.023. A comparison with field observations was conducted to identify the validity of the numerical solution of the flow equations. The obtained results indicate the feasibility of the numerical techniques using a weighting factor of 0.667 and a time increment of 6 hr. High accuracy and good agreement were achieved, and minimum Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 0.029 was gained for the obtained results compared with the corresponding field observations.
