RiverWare

RiverWare is the river and reservoir management model being used in the San Juan and Yakima River Basins (fig. 5). RiverWare is a general-purpose, interactive model building tool used to develop water-distribution models for short-term operations and scheduling, mid-term operations and planning, and longer-term policy and planning. The modeling framework was developed by the Center for Advanced Decision Support for Water and Environment Systems (CADSWES) at the University of Colorado with funding provided by Reclamation, Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and Electric Power and Research Institute (EPRI) (Fulp and others, 1995).

Within RiverWare, the user constructs the basic network of a river system that may include reservoirs, diversions, river reaches, confluences, or other components. Data associated with each component can be entered on-screen through spread sheets or imported from the database. The operations policy and rules associated with reservoirs or other system components within the basin are added to RiverWare through an existing constraint editor. Current modeling methods within RiverWare include basic reservoir simulation and water distribution through the network using linear programming, goal programming, and rule-based simulation approaches. As part of the Yakima River Basin WARSMP, water-rights allocation is being developed as an additional modeling method. Hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly computational time steps are supported.