The Watershed and River Systems Management Program: An Overview of Capabilities

Beginning in 1992, the Bureau of Reclamation and the US Geological Survey formulated plans for the Watershed and River Systems Management Program - a cooperative interagency effort to develop and implement flexible and robust river basin management tools for the benefit of managers and decision makers using a data centered approach. In addition to Reclamation and the USGS, a number of other agencies and universities have made substantial contributions to the success of the program. The effort first received research funding from the cooperating agencies in October of 1995 and has developed effective modeling tools for use on the San Juan, Colorado, Yakima and Umatilla basins in the western United States. Presently evolving applications include the Rio Grande basin in Colorado, New Mexico and Texas and the Truckee River basin in Nevada and California. Among the key tools in this effort are the RiverWare package developed for Reclamation by the University of Colorado's Center for Advanced Decision Support for Water and Environmental Systems (CADSWES), the Modular Modeling System developed by USGS and the Hydrologic Data Base (HDB) which interacts with both RiverWare and MMS and serves as the anchor to the data centered modeling approach.