Resource planners are charged with balancing projected increases in water demand to sustain growing populations and continued economic development without adversely impacting aquatic environments. A large-scale hydrological and water resources model has been developed by International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) as a tool to accurately assess water supply and demands imposed by societal and environmental needs.

The open source Community Water Model is designed to explore the economic trade-offs among different water management options, encompassing both water supply infrastructure and demand management. The scheme analyzes how future water demand will evolve in response to socioeconomic change and how water availability will be affected by climate change. The integrated modeling framework considers water demand from the environment as well as the agricultural, residential, energy and industrial sectors.

Hydrology can be simulated both globally and regionally at different resolutions from 30 arcmin to 30 arcsec at daily time steps using global, freely accessible data in the netCDF4 file format for reading, storage and production of data. The Community Water Model can also be linked with IIASA models, including the MESSAGE energy model, the GLOBIOM land use and ecosystems framework and the Environmental Policy Integrated (EPIC) model.

Researchers will continue to expand capabilities of the Community Water Model to include water quality considerations and a routing scheme related to reservoirs and canals to better simulate water availability in both agricultural and urban contexts.

Schematic of the processes included in the model. Source: IIASA