Water Resource System Modeling?
How does it work? what does it output? and how is it used?
Last updated
How does it work? what does it output? and how is it used?
Last updated
To understand how a water system performs today and to evaluate the impacts of future changes, planners build water resource system models.
Water resources systems can be small, like a city and its water supply sources, or large, like a country with many different rivers, water infrastructure assets and water users. Whether you're trying to evaluate the reliability of current sources, or evaluating new interventions under plausible future conditions, such a computer model helps track water throughout the system (spatially) and over time.
Given data on hydrological flows and climate, water demands and use, and water management rules and allocation, a water system model outputs water flows and volumes at each modeled location and time-step. When these results are aggregated, they provide an accurate picture of how different water interventions (changes to water policies or infrastructure) might perform.