Drought Water Right Curtailment
Abstract
California's water rights system allocates water based on priority, where lower priority, "junior" rights are curtailed first in a drought. The Drought Water Rights Allocation Tool (DWRAT) was developed to integrate water right allocation models with legal objectives to suggest water rights curtailments during drought. DWRAT incorporates water right use and priorities with a flow-forecasting model to mathematically represent water law and hydrology and suggest water allocations among water rights holders. DWRAT is compiled within an Excel workbook, with an interface and an open-source solver. By implementing California water rights law as an algorithm, DWRAT provides a precise and transparent framework for the complicated and often controversial technical aspects of curtailing water rights use during drought. DWRAT models have been developed for use in the Eel, Russian, and Sacramento river basins. In this study, an initial DWRAT model has been developed for the San Joaquin watershed, which incorporates all water rights holders in the basin and reference gage flows for major tributaries. The San Joaquin DWRAT can assess water allocation reliability by determining probability of rights holders' curtailment for a range of hydrologic conditions. Forecasted flow values can be input to the model to provide decision makers with the ability to make curtailment and water supply strategy decisions. Environmental flow allocations will be further integrated into the model to protect and improve ecosystem water reliability.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AGUFM.H51A1412W
- Keywords:
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- 1834 Human impacts;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 1880 Water management;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 6309 Decision making under uncertainty;
- POLICY SCIENCESDE: 6344 System operation and management;
- POLICY SCIENCES