Collaborative Groundwater Model Development

In our day of increasing conflicts for water resources, water management decisions require the understanding of the hydrologic nature of the interactions between water use and the water resources. In Kansas, conflicts for water resources occur at both the interstate and intrastate level, and have led to the development of groundwater models as tools for water management decision-making. In the past, groundwater model construction has typically been the responsibility of a single entity, with limited technical input from agencies and/or interested constituents, and peer review generally at the end of the model construction process. This has led to models with limited buy-in from the regulated community, limiting their usefulness in difficult and contested water management decisions. A robust, collaborative model development process was used in the development of the Republican River Compact Administration groundwater model by the states of Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska as part of their settlement of their compact litigation in 2002. More recently this model development process was used to build the Middle Arkansas River Basin groundwater model in south-central Kansas. The model development process used allowed multiple experts to review model datasets and calibration targets, test modeling assumptions, explore various modeling approaches, and determine when model construction was complete. While the process requires greater commitment of total resources, in both cases the process led to good, practical, defendable models, which are being used as tools to guide important water management decisions.