Powell Water Banking in CRSS

Using the Colorado River Simulation System (CRSS) in Riverware, two different modeling approaches were developed to represent changes to the Law of the River that would allow for more flexible water resource management by the Upper and Lower basins. A central piece of this flexibility is the expansion of ICS rules to provide each basin with a water storage account in Powell Reservoir. A system was implemented to record additional hydrologic traces based on observed river flows throughout the millennium drought (2000-2018). The two modeling strategies were evaluated using both historical flows (1906-1946) and a randomly generated sequence of repeated years from 2000-2018.