Water Supply Development and Modeling of Operations for a Surface-Groundwater Supply

 

The Colorado Water Conservation Board projects that there will be a need for an additional 600,000 AFY of water supply to be developed to meet municipal and industrial demands.  The South Platte basin, which includes the Denver metro area, is the most water short, having the greatest gap between available supplies and future demands.  New storage reservoirs are very difficult to permit and there is a scarcity of high quality supplies.  The last in-basin storage projects that can access the remaining high quality supplies under development.  However, there still remains the need for reliable yield. The East Cherry Creek Valley Water and Sanitation District (ECCV), United Water and Sanitation District (United) and the Arapahoe County Water and Wastewater Authority (ACWWA) will be managing a new water supply project that covers over 100 miles of the South Platte River in Colorado for an initial delivery of over 10,000 acre-feet of water.  This water supply project includes senior agricultural surface water rights to be transferred to municipal use from over 20 irrigation companies and junior direct flow, storage and recharge rights and alluvial groundwater pumping.  The water will be treated using reverse osmosis with concentrate disposal via brine minimization and deep well injection.

 

RiverWare is being used to develop a comprehensive operations and planning model for this project.  The objective of the model is to offset alluvial well pumping depletions and delayed historical return flow obligations from changed water rights with lagged accretions from groundwater recharge and direct flow and storage releases and exchanges.