David Neumann gave a presentation on the RiverWare, RiverSMART and RiverWISE decision support tools developed by CADSWES and used by many in the water management communities. He also gave live demonstrations of the tools in a 3-hour evening session. More about SEDHYD and the full program is available here.
Authors: David Neumann and Edith Zagona, Center for Advanced Decision Support, for Water and Environmental Systems (CADSWES), University of Colorado, Boulder.
Abstract: RiverWare, RiverSMART and RiverWISE are decisions support tools that assist water managers with forecasting, scheduling, operations, planning, scenario analysis and stakeholder communication. Central to the toolset is the RiverWare application, a river and reservoir modeling tool used by water managers, planners, consultants, utilities, researchers and stakeholders for forecasting and scheduling reservoir and hydropower operations, water rights and water accounting, developing and evaluating alternative operating policies and planning new projects. We will show how models are constructed from the palette of objects and linked together to form a river system network. We will show how data can be easily loaded into RiverWare from various sources, how operating policy is specified as user-specified logic and how outputs can be viewed in different ways and exported to files or databases.
We will show how the RiverWare Study Manager and Research Tools (RiverSMART) software framework facilitate the creation, execution and archiving of RiverWare planning studies. The tool can be used to compare the results of several scenarios representing differing hydrologic ensembles, demands, and strategies such as operating policies and infrastructure alternatives. In the demonstration, we will show how the various components of a planning study are configured and how the specified inputs are combined to create scenarios that are automatically simulated. We will demonstrate how the probabilistic results can be post-processed using various built-in and custom techniques and then archived for future analysis.
In addition, we will show how the RiverWare Interactive Scenario Explorer (RiverWISE) application allows stakeholders and other interested parties to explore a RiverWare model, develop alternative scenarios, simulate those scenarios, and investigate and compare the results. RiverWISE provides an intuitive, controlled environment for stakeholders to experiment with a special version of a RiverWare model. In the demonstration, we will show how to explore the WISE model layout, set up multiple input scenarios, run the scenarios, and view the results, comparing one run to the next.
Finally, we will demonstrate applications of these tools on real basins, explaining the types of analysis performed. Free evaluation versions of the RiverWare, RiverSMART, and RiverWISE software tools including demonstration models will be given to interested visitors. The RiverWare decision support toolset is developed by the University of Colorado Center for Advanced Decision Support for Water and Environmental Systems (CADSWES) with sponsorship of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.