May 29, 2013 Meeting

People:
Mazdak Arabi, Keith Paustian, André Dozier, Ryan Bailey, Dennis Ojima, James Pritchett, Amber Childress, and Shannon McNeeley

Agenda:

• Discuss progress made from each of the groups
• Discuss how to improve and synthesize SWSI and other future storylines (for full enumeration of future scenarios) 

Progress: 

Climate:

• Discussion with NCAR about climate modeling using WRF – can simulate extra 4 years (for a total of 12 years) for both the calibrated current model and the mid-century model… Use this model to do some cross-validation with the downscaled datasets
• WRF (a regional climate model) resolution – we were unsure, but after discussing with David Yates (at NCAR), we confirmed it was 4-km and runs sub-hourly, but output is available hourly
• 20-30 km CCSM (Warren from NREL)
• CMIP 5 downscaled data – use a PMF to weight likelihood of various scenarios

DayCent:

• Improving the soil-water submodel
• Linking into SWAT

Socio-Economic Modeling:

• Allie Gunter is meeting with Andre Dozier and Travis Warziniack to discuss linkages between GAMS and SWAT
• Allie building simpler models of the whole South Platte for now… Will get more detail later

SWAT-MODFLOW connection:

• Hydraulically linked
• About to test on small system and on Oregon sample watershed

Water allocation modeling:

• Connecting NHD data to water diversion structures and water rights databases
• Received schematics of water allocation in Division 1 and 64 within South Platte River Basin

Storylines: 

• Climate…………………………hot-dry, hot-moderate wet, cool-dry, drought severity
• Land-use / population…….get from SWSI
• Energy…………………………Stacy Tellinghuisen – western resource advocates report and others?
• Policy…………………………..water rights, more trading of water rights, market system

Comments:

• Study historical extreme events to be able to learn from them
• What overlapping areas between the storylines do we care about? Which can be considered decoupled? Solve enumeration weighting problem with PMFs instead of equal weighting
• Optimization includes land-use (but land-use has an initial trajectory from storyline) in order to incorporate feedback from economic model to hydrologic model
• Over-arching optimization is to pick best Ag-Urban water transfer strategies, and water

Conclusions and future direction: 

• Sectors to model economically – Ag, Urban, and perhaps Forest
• Meet every 2 months to give updates and generate draft storylines
• Meet within the next 2 weeks to discuss stakeholder engagement strategy with CWCB, CDWR, basin roundtables, CDM, Interbasin Compact Committee… look at State Water Plan and SWSI