lake mead and hoover dam from helecopterElliot Alexander defends his thesis: Searching for a Robust Operation of Lake Mead, July 26 at 10:00.

CINC Building, room  #102

Abstract:

The Colorado River spans seven US states and Mexico and is an important cultural, economic, and natural resource for 35 - 40 million people. Its complex operating policy is based on the “Law of the River,” which has evolved since the Colorado River Compact in 1922. Recent (2007) refinements to address shortage reductions and coordinated operations of Lakes Powell and Mead were negotiated with stakeholders in which hundreds of scenarios were explored to identify operating guidelines that could ultimately be agreed on. The Colorado River Basin’s water delivery reliability has continued to degrade since deciding these 2007 operational guidelines, due to the imbalance of growing demand and dwindling supply. The magnitude of this imbalance is challenging to predict since the most likely realization of future water demand and hydrology are unknown, thus describing conditions of deep uncertainty. Moreover, the demand-supply imbalance may stress the previously identified operational guidelines, motivating new methodology to supplement the existing planning to create new alternatives.

This research explores innovative planning approaches that are appropriate for conditions of deep uncertainty and then demonstrates an application of a method called Many Objective Robust Decision Making (MORDM). This MORDM application couples a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) with the Colorado River Simulation System (CRSS) model to generate and evaluate thousands of new operating policies for Lake Mead. The MOEA-generated policies are then re-simulated across multiple future water supply and water use scenarios testing each policy’s performance across a wide range of plausible future uncertainty. This analysis uncovered multiple candidate robust operating policies from the set of MOEA-generated policies. The operational similarities between the robust policies reveal that Lake Mead's current operation should consider significantly higher shortage volumes at lower pool elevations to be more robust under conditions of deep uncertainty. This research has laid the groundwork for practitioners and academics to use MOEAs and the MORDM framework to support future complex water management studies with real-world implications.