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The Colorado River Basin Robustness Analysis web application: a novel tool for visualizing and filtering candidate Lake Mead operation policies

This presentation reveals the Colorado River Basin (CRB) Robustness Analysis web application. Robustness analysis is the process of simulating management alternatives in an ensemble of plausible future States of the World (SOW), then using statistical functions, called robustness metrics, to quantify the performance of each alternative when “stress-tested” in the SOW ensemble. In this research, we simulated 463 Lake Mead policies in 500 SOW each using the Colorado River Simulation System, where each SOW samples future scenarios of hydrology, Upper Basin demand, and initial reservoir pool elevations. Then, we calculated eight classes of robustness metrics and created an interactive visualization web application to visualize Lake Mead policies and filter them by robustness. This presentation provides an overview of the web application plus an example robustness analysis workflow to identify promising policies. This research includes several novel contributions: a web-application built on the philosophy of robustness metric exploration and efficient filtering of management alternatives, leveraging the non-domination operator as an alternative to aggregating metrics, and overall a framework for the Bureau of Reclamation and CRB stakeholders to assess robustness of Lake Mead policies. Authors: Nathan Bonham1,2, Edith Zagona1,2, Joseph Kasprzyk1,2 1񱦵, department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering 2Center for Advanced Decision Support for Water and Environmental Systems, 񱦵.