Decision Support for Watershed and River System Management Applications on the Colorado River

Management of the resources of the Colorado River system is complicated by a 75-year history of laws, court decrees, treaties, and other agreements. Since the 1970’s, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) has used a suite of sitespecific, Fortran-based models to provide support in making operational, planning, and policy decisions. Due to increasing demands and constraints on the system, as well as expanding operational objectives, the old models were no longer capable of supporting the decision-making processes. However, given the long period of usage, the models were quite institutionalized in that we and our customer community (representatives of the seven basin states, water districts, etc.) felt comfortable in using the modeling results as a foundation for negotiation and compromise. Consequently, in 1994 the USBR embarked on a research and development program with the primary goals of developing a flexible, generic modeling system and using it to replace the old models. To meet the technical challenges of making the modeling tool flexible and generic, state-of-the-art programming design and development techniques were utilized. The political challenges of replacing the models in practice were met by actively involving the stakeholders (both within and outside of our agency) at the inception and throughout the development and implementation phases.