Water Availability Modeling and Planning
Water resource managers and policy makers have fewer and fewer options for new sources of surface and groundwater to meet increasing future water supply demands. Water availability planning requires a deep understanding of water resources, water rights, water conservation and public policy solutions to navigate often contentious negotiations to assure future water supplies. Aqua Strategies, although a small business, has top-level expertise and experience to support the baseline analysis and future projections for water availability studies. Key to this effort is our use of specialized and sophisticated water availability models including RiverWare and WRAP/WAM, and downscaled global climate models to provide insights into future climatic conditions. Aqua Strategies’ water availability projects include studies such as Oklahoma’s Red River Basin, Kiamichi Basin, and the City of Dripping Springs. We have also modeled water availability for all 23 river basins in Texas and developed multiple stand-alone reservoir yield analyses under decreasing capacity scenarios.
Project: Red River Water Availability RiverWare Model
Client: Texas Commission on Environmental Quality
Date: 2014 – 2016
Keywords: Water Availability; Water Resources Planning; Regional Planning; Instream Flows; Water Quality; Infrastructure Assessments; Climate Change; Groundwater and Surface Water; GIS Mapping; Water Treatment; Water Reuse
From 2014 to 2016, Aqua Strategies was the lead firm working collaboratively with scientists from the University of Oklahoma, Princeton University; and the U.S. Geologic Survey to develop a model for the entire Red River basin, from New Mexico to its confluence with the Mississippi River. The purpose was to forecast the range of hydrologic conditions and water availability based on various scenarios of climate change impacts.
As a central part of the project, Aqua Strategies led the development of a RiverWare model the entire Red River Basin. The RiverWare model was used for long term water planning projections, water rights evaluations, operational planning considerations and other factors relevant to the evaluating water availability scenarios. RiverWare is used by a number of states and federal agencies for real-time operational and flood control decision-making.
Aqua Strategies coordinated the collaborative effort to arrive at conclusions and recommendations for future water availability considerations, and was the lead author in the final report.
