A Nationwide Comprehensive Water Management System: Can We Get There and Why Should We Care

A primary mission of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE, Corps) is to manage the nation's water resources. The Corps performs this mission across multiple purposes at the direction of the United States Congress. To satisfactorily meet these sometimes conflicting purposes, both now and in the future, it is critical that the nation's water resources are studied and managed in a holistic and comprehensive approach. Several tools have been developed to study and manage our nation's water resources both from a planning and a real-time water management perspective. The suite of water management tools is the Corps Water Management System (CWMS) and the overarching tool to perform alternative analyses is the Hydrologic Engineering Center's (HEC) Watershed Analysis Tool (HEC-WAT). While these tools exist, unfortunately the Corps has not consistently applied these state-of-the-art tools across the nation. Even though the technical capabilities exist, the resources did not. This paper introduces both tools and describes new efforts that are attempting to implement these tools and why it is critical that these tools be applied consistently. In addition, a new multi-agency effort that will bring the technical resources of three Federal agencies closer together to address real-time and planning-related water resources issues will also be discussed.