Optimizing multiuse water management decisions under global change using integrated hydrologic modelsproject period: 4 1 2024 through 9 30 2027AWARD purpose: this research will advance and demonstrate…

This $499,000 Cooperative Agreement awarded by the U.S. Geological Survey under the Assistance to State Water Resources Research Institutes program (CFDA 15.805) will fund research at Cornell University to advance optimization frameworks for multi-use water management in the Delaware River Basin. The project aims to clarify tradeoffs and vulnerabilities in the basin's water management strategies under the impacts of climate change, shifting human system demands, and land use changes. Key activities include combining optimization and simulation modeling to identify candidate innovations in reservoir operations and drought mitigation policies, utilizing machine learning to better understand critical uncertainties, and developing improved visualization tools to support decision-making. The resulting computational framework and analytical tools are intended to aid water resources planning not just in the Delaware River Basin, but serve as a basis for a broader national river basin-scale stress testing capability.

Activities

The cornell team will combine optimization and simulation to searchfor candidate innovations in delaware river basins reservoirs operations and basin-scaledrought mitigation policies (e.g., changes to the flexible flow management program). Thesimulation-optimization experiments will specifically seek to understand how changes in policyor operations impact the basins multi-sector, multi-actor tradeoffs and their vulnerabilities todeeply uncertain climate change driven shifts in drought extremes, plausible changes in humansystem demands, and the candidate impacts of land-use land-cover changes. The robustoptimization formulations will consider 18 major reservoirs, 14 important river gage flowlocations, two major out-of-basin water supply transfers (new york city and new jersey), aswell as the multi-sectoral in-basin water demands. This effort will build on the cornell teamsadvances in decision support tools to clarify how deeply uncertain futures shape the equity, resilience, and robustness of alternative DRB management actions.deliverables and expected outcomes: this project will synthesize existing integrated hydrologicmodeling, planning documents, and information from major stakeholders to help innovatereservoir operations, water transfers, and water management policies. The research willcontribute an advanced computational analytical framework that is open, highly portable acrossdifferent computing resources, and broadly applicable beyond the delaware river basin. As partof this framework, the team will utilize state-of-the-art machine-learning to better understand thekey deeply uncertain factors, drivers, and dynamics that yield consequential outcomes fordelaware river basin stakeholders. To support exploration and communication of our results, the cornell team will contribute improved visualization tools that aid the discovery of equitable, robust, and resilient multi-use water management strategies for balancing the tradeoffs that canemerge across major basin stakeholders objectives (i.e., reliability, cost, resilience, hydropowerproduction, ecosystem services, etc.).

Intended beneficiaries

The core products from this study will be an extensible and reproduciblemulti-use water management optimization framework and analytical tools that can benefitplanning efforts in the delaware river basin as well as serve as a basis to aid in the developmentin a national river basin-scale stress testing capability more broadly.