Data to Supplement Adapting Colorado River Basin depletions to available water to live within our means

An open-source exploratory model is developed to assist in Colorado River long-term planning and management. The exploratory model complements existing simulation models by offering greater flexibility and speed to set up scenarios for uncertain future conditions and generate adaptive policies. The current version of this model includes the two largest reservoirs, two aggregated users, and three aggregated tributaries in the Colorado River Basin. This model is validated against the Colorado River Simulation System (CRSS), an official model currently used for the Colorado River basin. With the exploratory model, we develop and test an adaptive depletion to inflow policy, which is different from existing operating policies in the Colorado River. The adaptive policy takes advantage of the latest inflow information every year and provides a more sustainable way to operate the Colorado River system. This strategy offers a new way to manage the Colorado River system. This collection is to preserve and provide access to data used in the study in the interest of transparency and reproducibility of this work.