Coupling the human-natural water system:

Five years of participatory modeling and innovative

visualization

Court Strong and Sarah Null

Jordanelle Dam & Reservoir, structurae.net

Connection to objectives of iUTAH

• Enhance Utah’s competitiveness for securing external funding for research.

• Build on Utah’s existing strengths in hydrologic modeling to enhance forecasting capabilities for water managers and stakeholders

• Create new models and link currently disparate models and data sets

• Develop innovative and impactful visualizations

Outline

• Development of cutting edge modeling and research capabilities

• Impactful legacy of visualization innovation

• Examples of strong stakeholder engagement and infrastructure building

Agent-Based Modeling of Households

Effects of motivation, social networks, and opportunity on water use

Work in a few

Logan iUTAHNeighborhoods

iUTAH Survey Responses(motivation,

social network)

Appliance Data (volume, frequency,

duration of use)

Parcel Data(landscape area, lot size)

Water Use over Time (1000 gal)

Household Municipal Water Use

Data(validate model)

Household agents in peer social network

Scenarios• Interact with peers• Water supply manager

encourages

Ryan James & David E. Rosenberg

Agent-Based Modeling of Households

Model enables us to answer key stakeholder questions:

1. How do non-price factors individually and together effect water saved?

2. Do household agents change behaviors (e.g., shorter showers) or upgrade infrastructure (e.g., replace showerheads)?

3. What common characteristics do household agents who adopt water conservation actions share?

4. Can iUTAH and other data for Logan, UT validate model results?

Ryan JamesDavid E. Rosenberg

Ryan James & David E. Rosenberg

Water criticality (supply/demand)

• Climate change from 231 global climate model simulations

• Governor's office population projections

Khatri, Strong, Kochanski, Burian, Miller, Hassenyager

(submitted to Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management )

Krishna Khatri and Court Strong

Key outcome: Criticality of Utah’s water resources will be

driven mainly by population growth, with some mitigation

by modest increases in gross effective precipitation from

climate change.

IntCrit = (precip-evap)/demand

ExtCrit = (precip - evap + groundwater + inflow)/demand

Water criticality (supply/demand)

Khatri, Strong, Kochanski, Burian, Miller, Hassenyager

(submitted to Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management )

Krishna Khatri and Court Strong

Weather generator model Kimberly Smith and Court Strong

• Stochastic Harmonic Autoregressive Parametric (SHArP) weather generator model

• Statistical model for simulation of daily temperature and precipitation

• Computationally efficient

• Simulates observationally-informed spatial patterns

• Captures extremes of climate

Observations existing modelsSHArP

Smith K, Strong C, Rassoul-Agha F, 2017 (2017) J. Appl. Meteor. Clim.

HydroCouple Software Framework

• A component-based modeling framework for coupling water resources and other related earth systems models

• Supports various hydrologic, hydraulic, and hydrodynamic geospatial and time varying data structures

• Supports parallelized simulations on high performance computing resources

Caleb Buahin & Jeff Horsburgh

High Resolution Urban Drainage System Model:A 1D and 2D coupled model developed using the HydroCouple Framework

• One dimensional model• Developed from the EPA

Stormwater Management Model

• Simulates flows in pipes, culverts, inlets, and outfalls.

• Two-dimensional model• Newly developed model

called Finite Volume Hydrologic Model (FVHM)

• Simulates overland, riverine, and canal flows

• Solves flow equations over a flexible unstructured computational mesh

Caleb Buahin & Jeff Horsburgh

Optimizing Barrier Removal to Restore River Connectivity in Utah’s Weber Basin

• Prioritize barrier removal in Utah’s Weber River

• Develop generalizable optimization model with dual objectives

• Economic water demands (water supply)

• Quality-weighted, connected Bonneville cutthroat trout habitat

• Evaluate tradeoffs between aquatic ecosystems and human water uses

Maggi Kraft & Sarah E. Null

Monthly Habitat Suitability (0-1) is a function of stream temperature, gradient, flow, and geomorphic condition

Major findings

Some barriers have a high priority to be removed in all months

• Promising for river restoration• Months variable by streamflow,

stream temperature, and fish habitat requirements

Some barriers inexpensive to remove, with little impact to water demands

• Promising to connect habitat for river restoration

Maggi Kraft & Sarah E. Null

Optimizing Barrier Removal to Restore River Connectivity in Utah’s Weber Basin

New method to organize, compare, and prepare water management data for models

Water rights

and uses

(17 states)

Reservoirs

(17 states)

Streamflow

(National)

Connectivity

(Bear River)

Infrastructure

Info/operations

(National/ Bear

River)

Water Management

Data Model

(WaMDaM)

Controlled

vocabulary

Models

(Bear River)

Water management data sources Organize and synthesize Query and compare

Adel Abdallah & David E. Rosenberg

Key findings and further work:

• Controlled vocabulary allow to query and compare across data sets

• Built tools to speed and validate data loading

• Reveal similarities and discrepancies across complex data sets

• Will export same data to multiple models to facilitate model comparisons

• Participation by others will expand reach of data system

14

Adel AbdallahDavid E. Rosenberg

New method to organize, compare, and prepare water management data for models

Impactful visualizationThe iUTAH Visualization Lab (iVL)

• Interactive kiosk at NHMU seen

by 278,000 visitors annually

• Web interfaces for several key

iUTAH data sets

• Visualizations featuring

innovative three-dimensional

animation of iUTAH data

• GIS support for sophisticated

maps in publications

Martin Buchert

Summary• Agent-based modeling of households

• Water criticality (supply/demand) under climate change

• Weather generator model (SHArP)

• HydroCouple Software framework

• High resolution urban drainage system model

• Optimizing barrier removal to restore river connectivity (Weber Basin)

• New frameworks for organizing, comparing, and preparing water management data for models

• Web-based and museum visualizations