Mazdak Arabi
Associate Professor 
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, Colorado
Email: mazdak.arabi@colostate.edu
Voice: (970) 491-4639

Modeling Infrastructure for Water Sustainability Analysis

Water is essential for socioeconomic development and maintaining healthy 
ecosystems. Population growth, together with increasing demands from 
agriculture, energy and environmental uses intensify competition for 
freshwater resources. In water stressed regions, climate variability and 
change exacerbate conflicts among users by altering supply-demand patterns 
and water quality. Striking a balance between water supply and conflicting 
demands necessitates assessing potential benefits and costs of various water 
management strategies. In the western U.S., compliance with water compacts, 
environmental regulations, and other institutional agreements increasingly 
discourages development of new water supply facilities and trans-basin 
transfers. Thus, in-basin strategies are crucial to enhancing the resiliency 
and reliability of regional water resource systems. 

In this seminar, a new integrative and adaptive analysis framework for the 
development of optimal water management at the regional scale under 
projected future climate, land use and energy scenarios is presented. This 
framework leads to a better understanding and managing of resources under 
stress, integrating physical, ecological, and socioeconomic feedbacks. An 
integrated modeling and optimization framework reconciles regional water 
resource sustainability, socioeconomic, and institutional criteria to 
identify solutions that provide the highest level of resiliency at the 
lowest cost. The framework serves several benefits: (i) it reveals the 
feasibility of satisfying water demands and water quality targets, under the 
prevailing governance systems, for any combination of projected climate, 
land use and energy scenarios; (ii) it exposes components of the hydrologic 
and governance systems that are key to achieving water quantity and quality 
targets; and (iii) it determines cost-effective options to enhance the 
resiliency and reliability of water resources while sustaining desired 
levels of agricultural production and livelihood of rural communities in the 
region.

A web-based cloud computing infrastructure dubbed eRAMS facilitates wider 
accessibility and scalability of the modeling, optimization and analysis 
tools. Key features and software architecture of eRAMS will be discussed.