Science activity

Managing California water operations for multiple priorities under long term drought conditions is becoming an increasing challenge which is compounded by potential sea level rise. This project is a pilot exercise to demonstrate the utility of hydrodynamic and salinity transport models in to understand options for salinity management under extended drought combined with climate change and sea level rise. The project will also consider how to make model outputs available and relevant to other modeling and environmental management decision making efforts. The full range of potential sea level rise, restoration and operational actions is extensive, involving many potential combinations of individual actions. Therefore, it is difficult to fully explore potential actions with high resolution multi-dimensional models. The proposed approach is to use high resolution multi-dimensional flow and transport models to evaluate changes in transport in the Delta under sea level rise, restoration, and operational scenarios. The predicted changes to salinity for a given scenario will inform operations modeling in CALSIM through re-calibration of an ANN to approximately account for the changed salinity response of the estuary. Operations modeling incorporating the revised ANN will then estimate Delta inflows and overall water cost to meet Delta standards for the scenario. “Round-trip” modeling will be performed using the detailed Delta models to verify that the predicted hydrologic inputs allow appropriate compliance with water quality standards and will provide other metrics related to Delta transport.