Editor’s Note

This special section of this issue of the Journal of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering is an update of a session originally presented at the ASCE Watershed Management Conference held in Fort Collins, Colorado in June of 2000.

The focus of that conference session (and this issue of the Journal) was on several major modeling efforts in which the Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) is involved. These are by no means the only modeling efforts involving BOR, but they are a representative sample.

The paper entitled “The Watershed and River Systems Management Program—An Overview of Capabilities” describes a long standing cooperative effort between BOR and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to cooperate on model development in several key river basins in the western United States. Some of the key modeling tools described in this paper include the Modular Modeling System (MMS) developed by USGS, the Hydrologic Data Base and the RiverWare modeling framework developed by the University of Colorado’s Center for Advanced Decision Support for Water and Environmental Systems (CADSWES) for use by BOR and other agencies and stakeholder groups.

The paper entitled “The Hydrologic Modeling Inventory—A Cooperative Research Effort” describes work by Dr. Vijay P. Singh of Louisiana State University and the technical staff at BOR to collect and share useful information including capabilities, data requirements, modeling methodology, and contact information about a number of key hydrologic modeling tools developed in government, academic, and private sectors.

“Modeling Uncertainty in an Object-Oriented Reservoir Operations Model” explains the use of RiverWare to deal with the wide range of uncertainty issues which accompany the management of multipurpose reservoirs in water scarce regions such as the western United States. Some of the key issues where uncertainty plays an important role include flood control, water delivery, generation of hydroelectric power, and maintenance of minimum flows and reservoir pool elevations for environmental purposes.

The final paper is entitled “Stochastic Streamflow Simulation using SAMS 2002.” This paper focuses on another longstanding cooperative effort between BOR and Colorado State University to develop and maintain the Stochastic Analysis, Modeling and Simulation (SAMS) tool. SAMS allows water resources managers to consider a wide range of equally likely hydrologic scenarios that could be encountered in the future as they formulate long-term reservoir operations strategies.

We hope that this set of papers will provide readers with an informative and useful glimpse at some of the modeling work being done by BOR and its partners in the governmental and academic communities. Additional information about each of these activities can be obtained from the primary authors of the respective papers.

The Journal would like to thank all of the contributing authors for their efforts in this special section of this issue.