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CEE Seminar - Navigating uncertain future conditions for Colorado River Basin water management

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Tuesday, January 21, 2025
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Dr. Joseph Kasprzyk, Associate Professor, Center for Advanced Decision Support for Water and Environmental Systems, Civil Environmental and Architectural Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder
CEE Spring Seminar Series 2025

The Colorado River Basin (CRB) is a vitally important resource for Western US water supply, agriculture, and hydropower. The 1922 Colorado River Compact promoted growth by allocating a fixed amount of water to Upper and Lower Basin states, not foreseeing potential conflicts over inadequate supply. Lakes Powell and Mead have the capacity to store up to four years' average use, but storage has generally decreased since 2000. Although the 2007 Interim Guidelines (IG) set up a system of water shortages that were linked to reservoir storage elevations, the IG and subsequent drought management plans were not enough to protect system storage given continued drought. These regulations are set to expire in 2026, with a new management plan currently being negotiated. In support of this effort, the US Bureau of Reclamation has sponsored a research program on Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty (DMDU) methods at CU Boulder's Center for Advanced Decision Support for Water and Environmental Systems (CADSWES). Reclamation created a publicly available DMDU web tool (https://www.crbpost2026dmdu.org/), allowing anyone to create policies and evaluate their performance under a wide array of possibilities of future water supply and demand for multiple output dimensions.
This presentation will discuss our ongoing research on DMDU methods in the CRB. DMDU seeks to address challenges including conflicting goals of multiple stakeholders (preserving storage versus preventing shortages), divergent potential future conditions (a range of drier and wetter hydrologic inputs), and complicated relationships between decisions and outcomes. We use multi-objective simulation-based optimization with the CRSS model to generate policies. The Self Organizing Map (SOM) is introduced to intelligently organize a diverse range of scenarios, allowing users to navigate the data and discover how policies' performance is transformed across a changing landscape of potential conditions. The SOM can visualize any policy's performance in coherent groupings of input scenarios, and those groupings can subsequently be used to select input scenarios for robust optimization and adaptive management. The ultimate goal of this work is to help Reclamation and Basin stakeholders maintain flexibility when future conditions become more severe than originally anticipated, as is currently happening in the CRB.

Contact: Nicolle Hinz