Integrated Water Resources Management

Introduction Water law often drives the decisions made in operations and planning of water systems. Water law is the foundation for administering and managing water supplies. Because of the importance of water law in water planning and operations modeling, water rights modeling capability in your model should adequately represent the legal systems currently in place. This post summarizes the basic legal systems used to manage and facilitate allocation of limited water supplies. The summaries of legal systems presented in this post are founded on my understanding of U.S. Water Law and a cursory review and comparison of systems used in Canada and Australia. Following a short description of each basic legal system, a summary of modeling requirements for the system is explored. Legal Systems for Water Allocation For the purposes of this post, I refer to a water user as an “account.” All accounts have a demand for water and a water right that justifies use of their water. W...

Introduction Optimization is a very large topic, even within the confines of water resources planning and management. For today, I would like to focus on a single application, which I found while reading the Journal of the American Water Resources Association (JAWRA). I highly recommend JAWRA as a great source on all things water resources and for updates on the latest issues. In the February 2011 issue (yes, I'm a little behind on my reading), there is an article called "Optimal Pollution Trading without Pollution Reductions: A Note". I would like to take the time to write up a review of this article. Pollutant Trading Application Pollutant trading is in it's infancy - the experimental stages. Current challenges include high transaction costs, difficulties in transferring liabilities, and pollution allowances in existing programs. This article describes how two different types of polluters (farm and factory) can collaborate in order to reduce the impact on rece...

It is necessary to study not only parts and processes in isolation, but also to solve the decisive problems found in the organization and order unifying them, resulting from dynamic interaction of parts, and making the behavior of parts different when studied in isolation or within the whole. Systems Modular systems modeling is an approach to modeling that can be very useful for applications in integrated water resources management because of its inherent structure and organization. Every system is designed to achieve some objective. A system is made up of a network of interrelated components, which may consist of data, data processors, reporting elements, and subsystems. The term "Systems Modeling" was introduced in the early 1960's and became famous shortly after the birth of FORTRAN. Since that time, it grew steadily in popularity until finally plateauing in the year 2000. The term "Systems Approach" peaked in 1975 and has since been on a steady decline...

Introduction Reservoir storage is necessary to regulate highly variable water flows for more constant uses such as municipal and industrial water supply, irrigation, hydroelectric power generation, and navigation. Typically, the water drawn from a reservoir is used at a much slower (and constant) rate than the rate and consistency of the water flowing into the reservoir (see Figure 1). Reservoir modeling has typically been employed to help size reservoir storage capacities, establishing operating policies, evaluating operating plans, administering water allocations, developing management strategies, and real-time operations. Figure 1 - Inflow and Outflow Hydrograph The basic requirement for adequate representation of a reservoir is employment of the continuity equation, or conservation of volume over a period of time. This is a function that interacts dynamically with the current state of the reservoir. The foundational equation for conservation of volume is: The term “Res...

Over the years, I've heard what people consider to be the challenges we face in trying to manage our water resources and plan for the future. I decided to take it upon myself and discover what people are publishing in regards to the types of challenges we face. I searched about 30 documents (articles and other publications) and found that most the challenges can be organized into 6 categories. The challenges include:  Water quality   Competing Uses   Increasing demands   Climate change   Land use change   Institutional challenges*   I counted which categories people focused on and summarized it in a pie chart. Most publications listed more than one type of challenge. *managing risk, coordination, corruption, conflicting policies, inadequate funds Within these different types of challenges people focus on, I found some interesting aspects regarding the types of authors that report these challenges. ...

The Kirshen approach to IWRM I recently read an interesting article titled, "Challenges in Graduate Education in Integrated Water Resources Management" (Kirshen, 2004) that expressed the need for implementation of integrated water resources management. In this article, four pillars of IWRM were presented. The pillars are summarized as: These pillars are described in detail below. Systems Analysis includes system evaluation, optimization approaches, statistical analysis, simulation modeling, decision analysis, risk assessment, multi-criteria analysis, and the development of indicators and metrics for analyzing problems. The Science and Technology of Water involves hydrology, fate and transport of environmental contaminants, water chemistry, water quality, water conservation, and water resources engineering. Biological Aspects of Water, Health and Nutrition covers ecology, environmental impacts, food and nutrition, epidemiology of...

I would like to try and address a few questions about model documentation. This is often said to be an important part of building models for Integrated Water Resources Management because there are usually a lot of people involved from various disciplines and backgrounds. Typically you will see two different forms of documentation out there, including user documentation and programmer documentation. The user documentation is usually created to assist the end user interact with the input controls and view the results. The latter is usually there to help the user and/or programmer how the program actually works. So, first and foremost: What is model documentation? Model documentation is written text that accompanies the computer model. It either explains how it operates or how to use it or both, and may mean different things to people in different roles (Wikipedia, 2011). Why do people think documentation is important? The US Army Corps of Engineers (which happens to develop som...