Water Delivery Projections
Authors
- Mazdak Arabi, Ph.D. – Colorado State University
- Hadi Heidari, Graduate Student – Colorado State University
- Thomas C. Brown, Ph.D. – USDA Forest Service
- Travis Warziniack, Ph.D. – USDA Forest Service
Purpose
Projections of water deliveries during the 21st century can be used to determine water supply sustainability indicators such as water supply scarcity, vulnerability, reliability, and resiliency; water use per capita, water import per capita, reservoir storage, groundwater depletion under alternative future climate, population and land use scenarios. It showed that, in the absence of adaptation, serious water shortages are likely in some regions of the United States. Comparison of projected demands with projected future supplies indicates where and when adaptations to changing conditions would be needed.
Description
Water supply of a basin in a given month is equal to water yield produced in the basin plus inflow from upstream basins, net import via trans-basin diversions, and within-basin reservoir storage from the prior month (net of evaporation from that storage), and minus required basin in-stream flows and releases to downstream users. The Water Evaluation and Planning (WEAP) model was used to route water within a network and compute monthly water shortages. The model uses linear programming to solve the water allocation problem, whose objective is to maximize the satisfaction of demands subject to allocation priorities, mass balances, water availability and other constraints. The WEAP model was run at the monthly time step for the period from 1950 to 2100 to calculate past and future water shortages for each basin within each network. The WEAP model was first to run for the baseline, for all 14 alternative futures plus the no-climate-change condition to provide an understanding of the range of possible future conditions.
Attributes
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ASR – Assessment Subregions
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TBD – Transbasin Diversions
