Abstract
New Approaches to Decision Making for the Colorado River Basin
The Center for Advanced Decision Support for Water and Environmental Systems (CADSWES) is a research center in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. Since the 1980s we have been dedicated to developing decision support tools for the water management community, undertaking research to advance the science, and bridging the gap between science and practice by integrating leading edge discoveries in software tools. This talk will give a brief overview of CADSWES activities, then describe 2 areas of research and development that are particularly important currently for solving pressing water management problems. CADSWES has collaborated with the Bureau of Reclamation on the research, development and applications of the RiverWare suite of modeling tools that is used for decision-making and operational management of the Colorado River Basin (CRB) and numerous other basins in the western US. On the Colorado River, the onset of the Millennium Drought motivated the 2007 adoption of the Interim Guidelines for Lower Basin Shortages and Coordinated Operations for Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Following this, CADSWES initiated a research effort to apply the principles of many-objective robust decision-making (MORDM) to expand the options for identifying and evaluating robust policies and providing tools for collaborative decision-making. We describe the results of this research and how Reclamation is currently using the techniques for exploring alternatives for the Post-2026 follow-on policies for the CRB. For forecasting operations for the CRB over the coming seasons, up to 2 years, Reclamation has relied on an operations model that is driven by forecasts that use Ensemble Streamflow Prediction provided by the NWS River Forecast Center. Climate change has undermined the skill of these forecasts. Recent and ongoing research explores alternative methods to produce more skillful forecasts including machine learning using a variety of predictors.
Biography
Edith Zagona, Research Professor, University of Colorado at Boulder
Director, Center for Advanced Decision Support for Water and Environmental Systems (CADSWES)
Edith Zagona is a Research Professor and Director of CADSWES at CU Boulder where she leads the research, development and commercialization of the RiverWare suite of decision support tools. She and her R&D team collaborate with water management agencies including the Bureau of Reclamation, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Tennessee Valley Authority and others to advance the science of water management, provide technology transfer to the global water management community, and educate the next generation of experts. Her research focuses on water resource systems and modeling, planning and operations of multi-objective river and reservoir systems, hydropower optimization and decision making under deep uncertainty. Zagona received a Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Arizona, M.S. at Colorado State University, and Ph.D. at the University of Colorado. She worked for the Bureau of Reclamation before attending CU and has over 40 years of professional experience in the field of water resources development and management.