RiverSMART provides a graphical workspace to view, control, and fully understand all the steps involved in a RiverWare-based study. A sample RiverSMART workspace is shown in Figure 1.1. Add events and intermediate files to the workspace and connect them to show the flow of information. Each icon represents either a process—called an event—or a set of files produced by one or more processes. At the center of each study is the RiverWare event that is both the destination for all inputs and the source of all outputs. The arrows indicate the flow of information.

The following sections provide general descriptions of the features and uses of the available events.

The Hydrology Simulator is used to develop an ensemble of hydrology representing possible future supplies. The simulator uses non-parametric K-nearest-neighbor resampling techniques to generate ensembles of hydrologic traces based on historical data, optionally conditioned on long paleo-reconstructed data using various Markov Chain techniques, or conditioned on downscaled GCM projections to capture increased variability.

The hydrology disaggregators allow the results to be disaggregated spatially—from one to many locations—and temporally—for example, from annual data to monthly data using a pattern.

To create scenarios, specify alternative inputs, and RiverSMART generates combinations of these inputs. Following are brief descriptions of the possible inputs that can be included as alternatives.

RiverSMART combines all combinations of alternative inputs to produce a list of possible scenarios. From these possible scenarios, select the ones that are applicable or meaningful. Provided tools can be used to sort and filter the list of scenarios for ease of selection, and unneeded scenarios can be hidden from the displays.

RiverSMART then manages the execution of the simulations. You can distribute RiverWare Multiple Run Management (MRM) simulations (concurrent runs) to different processors on one machine or create packages that can be distributed to many computers or cloud instances. The overall simulation processing time is thus reduced through parallel processing.

The results of the simulations are output files—typically text-based RiverWare Data Format (RDF) files and Comma Separated Values (CSV) files—that are ready for post-processing.

Once the scenarios have been simulated, post-process the results using provided tools or user-defined R scripts.

The built-in post-processing tools include tools that do the following:

In addition, scenarios can be grouped to form scenario sets for additional post-processing. Scenario sets are user-defined groups of scenarios that assist in analyzing and comparing results across scenarios. For example, you can create a set of scenarios that have the same hydrology but different demands and policies, or a set of scenarios with a common policy but differing demands and hydrologies. You can further post-process the scenario sets using GPAT and R script tools

RiverSMART provides additional tools to do the following: