Overview:
Demand for our world’s decreasing water supply continues to accelerate beyond what many argue is a sustainable rate of use. Estimates from the U.S. Geological Survey and the International Water Management Institute claim that nearly 1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water due to increasing irrigation, industrial domestic uses, saltwater intrusion, and groundwater pollution. In addition to competing stakeholder demands, nations continue to experience significant climate-driven flooding and drought events that make managing this resource ever more complex. Given this outlook and increasing regulatory pressures at the basin and watershed level to monitor and manage this resource, it is imperative that decision makers have smart tools that assist them in optimizing sustainable outputs from our surface and groundwater resources, minimizing losses and mitigating risks due to floods and drought conditions.
PBMO™ is designed to support water resources managers and decision makers by optimizing the management of available resources among many constraints, competing interests and variables. The PBMO™ toolkit integrates management optimization modules with MODFLOW-SURFACT™/MODHMS®, HGL’s complete simulator for flow and transport in the groundwater and surface water systems. The coupling of optimization with robust modeling tools enables the user to efficiently manage and allocate water resources, control and mitigate flooding conditions, and optimally manage drought conditions. Applied to water resource management, the tool balances water extraction needs with resource protection. By linking modeling and computational optimization, PBMO™ can realistically capture important site physics and financial constraints; achieve a coherent interpretation of disparate site data using all relevant information; and produce structured, credible solutions acceptable to stakeholders and regulators.
See animations below describing HGL’s motivation for developing PBMO™ and a description of the technology:
Motivation for PBMO™ (Runtime 3:25)
PBMO™ Technology Description (Runtime 5:40)
Applications/Benefits:
- Allocations Water Resources Among Competing Users
- Flood Management and Risk Reduction
- Drought Management
- Maximizes Sustainable Yield of Well Fields Subject to Regulatory Requirements
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