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The Utah Colorado River Accounting and Forecasting – Decision Support Tool (UCRAF – DST) is a modeling system that supports sustainable management of western water resources systems by enabling managers to devise and assess different drought mitigation strategies within the Colorado River Basin in Utah. A pilot UCRAF-DST modeling system has been developed for the Duchesne River basin in northeastern Utah. This modeling system combines a Diversion-Runoff Calculator (DRC), with inputs from geospatial datasets including remotely-sensed consumptive use data, field boundary datasets, and other internet/web services, with a RiverWare© rule-based accounting-enabled simulation model.This presentation serves as a general update on the status of the ongoing project and opportunity to share findings and solicit feedback from the broader community of RiverWare users.
Preliminary results from the Duchesne River Basin UCRAF-DST exemplify how conserved water from drought mitigation actions can be administered instream or kept in reservoir storage. Furthermore, the lessons learned during development of the UCRAF-DST model in the Duchesne basin have proven invaluable for subsequent development of the UCRAF-DST modeling systems in the San Rafael and Price basins in central Utah. The RiverWare models are Inline Rulebased Simulation and Accounting models which leverage RiverWare’s accounting framework, rulesets, and when applicable, water rights solver, to implement flexible operations. RiverWare’s dynamic water rights and accounting capabilities facilitate the development of different RiverWare models that are tailored to each basin and their administrative processes. Preliminary Duchesne model results as well as several unique administrative challenges posed by the Duchesne, San Rafael, and Price basins will be described, showing how the UCRAF-DST modeling system can be adapted to effectively represent the unique operational regimes of each basin. |
