Document Type

Report

Publisher

Utah State University

Publication Date

2-25-2025

First Page

1

Last Page

15

Abstract

Our project goal is to use immersive online collaborative modeling as a tool for active learning to communicate and manage users conflicting risks of water shortages because decisions now to manage risk effect future risk. State-of-the art river basin forecasting tools provide probabilistic estimates of streamflow at hourly to annual scales. Water resource models quantify tradeoffs and risk across hundreds or thousands of scenarios of inflow and demand forecast out decades. Our project objectives are: 1) Formulate extreme scenarios for reservoir inflows without probabilities one to three years out that pose imminent risk of water shortages. 2) Hold immersive model sessions with the purpose to stabilize and recover reservoir storage under conditions of extreme low inflow and storage. In a session up to 6 basin partners will personify water user roles, articulate their user’s risk(s), and formulate strategy(s) to manage risks. Our partners are from Federal and state agencies—including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—agricultural users, urban users, and others with large, old, settled used and unused water rights. Then, partners will adapt their strategies in response to their available water, others decisions, and the real-time discussion of decisions. 3) Evaluate the effectiveness of immersive modeling to communicate and manage future risk of water shortages. We will use discussions in sessions to elicit insights into why and how partners perceive and include forecasts, uncertainty, values, preferences, physical constraints, legal constraints, and risks to other users in their decisions to manage risk. We will also use discussion to synthesize requests to improve NOAA forecasting products. 4) Discuss opportunities with River Basin Forecasters to add tools to manage risk of water shortages in their products and to add forecast products in immersive models. We will apply our methods in the Colorado River Basin, USA and Mexico as a high-profile basin that supplies water to approximately 40 million people, 15% of all U.S. farmland, and already faces water shortages. Our 1.75-year project will advance the CIROH goal to deliver water resources intelligence to communicate and manage risk. Our project will also advance CIROH goals to be a knowledge mobilizer and community catalyst by promoting collaboration across scientific and practitioner communities in support of the NOAA’s vision for a water-ready nation. Our project will specifically address NOAA’s Research Theme 4, Focus Area 1: How can we effectively communicate risks of water shortages at different scales. Our project will also help implement NOAA priorities to respond to competing demands for increasingly limited and stressed water supply while provide reservoir managers actionable information. In our education and outreach, we will: A) Train 1 post-doctoral and 5 student researchers to guide model sessions, build immersive models at different spatial scales, and synthesize data into quantitatively sound, socially sophisticated summaries of key findings. B) Hold an online immerse-athon to reach approximately 50 students at participating CIROH institutions. C) Develop immersive learning modules with rubrics to assess student ability to integrate engineering, economics, hydrology, law, and other factors into analyses of resource management problems. We see broader impacts to provide fun, low-stakes, and lowtime input places where basin partners can explore novel strategies to manage risk while grow empathy for other users situations. We will share press releases of findings to help inform public discussion of policies that are more adaptive to changing risk. We will post our immersive models and supporting materials to public repositories so that others can develop their own immersive models for forecast centers in other regions and globally.

Download

Share

COinS