Untitled DocumentWater Markets Physical Systems Model Development
Macro Theme Area:
Integrated Modeling [Project ID: M05]
PI:
Douglas P. Boyle
CO-PI(s):
Hoshin Gupta, Steve Markstrom
Basin focus:
Rio Grande
Specific area in
basin /
field sites:
Reach II of Middle Rio Grande
Summary/Goals: The demand for water in the southwestern United States has increased in tandem with a rapid growth of population over the past 50 years. With ever increasing demands being placed on available water supplies, improving water management becomes crucial to the sustainability of the region's water resources. Researchers within this SAHRA project are investigating the feasibility of water leasing as a method for more efficiently distributing water among competing users. Specifically, this project is focused on identifying and understanding the impact of potential third party effects resulting from moving water from one location to another under a variety of different leasing (trading) scenarios.
Activities and outcomes during past year:
A medium resolution model (MRM) was developed, applied and tested on reach II of the middle Rio Grande. A variety of different water leasing experiments were conducted with the MRM to identify and investigate any third party affects that may result from the associated water trades. Experiments ranged from simple trades up and down a delivery ditch to much more complex trades across one or more ditch conveyance systems. Preliminary results indicated that although the impacts of the trades in terms of third party effects appear to be limited, the complexity of the water delivery system and the frequent under deliveries in baseline model runs preclude a straight forward methodology for comparisons with trades. As a result, we plan to focus much of our attention in the upcoming reporting period on developing new objective criteria for comparing results from base run (no trades) with trade runs.
Plans for the upcoming year:
In 2009, we plan to complete the research associated with water leasing and third party effects in reach II of the middle Rio Grande. We also plan to continue working on Stage 6 (scenario analysis) this spring with modeling experiments to follow in the summer of 2009.
