Whole Basin Water Resources Planning Model for the Rio Grande/Bravo

The binational Rio Grande/Bravo basin, located in North America, is considered to be a highly water scarce region. The Physical Assessment project is a collaborative effort between technical and expert counterparts in Mexico and the United States that is aimed at exploring opportunities for improving management of the scarce water resources of the river through development of management scenarios. The Physical Assessment project is focused on creating management scenarios which fall within the current water allocation structure in the basin including treaties, compacts and water rights. To evaluate the hydrologic feasibility of possible water management scenarios, a hydrologic planning model is being constructed in the Water Evaluation and Planning system, or WEAP. The hydrologic and hydraulic information to support the model is provided from a relational Arc Hydro geodatabase which contains geographic, hydrologic, hydraulics and related data for the entire Rio Grande/Bravo basin.