The Confluence Water Resources Planning Model
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Welcome to Confluence!
Water supply planning is becoming more complex, as water system managers and resource planners must make decisions on future water supplies and infrastructure in a context of an increasingly scarce resource, uncertain future demands and supplies, environmental concerns, financial constraints, institutional challenges, and growing customer scrutiny. All of these make it crucial to carefully evaluate and compare future resource strategies, the importance and difficulty of which is magnified by the prospect of future climate change, which introduces a new and potentially critical layer of unpredictability.
Not only must different types of supply and facility options be assessed, but “non-structural” options such as conservation, reclamation, and conjunctive use must also be considered. All of these must be evaluated against criteria on which key stakeholders often disagree. A potentially large number of strategies must be analyzed and compared quickly, and the results must be presented to a variety of audiences in a meaningful way.
Confluence® was developed by Gary Fiske and Associates expressly to address these challenges. It simulates current and future water supply system operation against user-specified weather and hydrologic conditions, and subject to user-defined operating constraints. Its analytical power makes it applicable to the most complex systems, but its ease of use makes it accessible to smaller water utilities with fewer analytic resources. It features an intuitive user interface and easily-understood chart and tabular outputs, which can readily be tailored to meet the needs of staff and stakeholders.
Confluence and Climate Change
The increasing likelihood that future weather and runoff patterns will differ from the past poses an unprecedented challenge to water managers and planners. Changes in climate can affect both customer demand and water supply availability.
CONFLUENCE HAS BEEN UPGRADED TO DIRECTLY ADDRESS THESE FUTURE CLIMATIC UNCERTAINTIES.
New model features enable users to easily define different climate change scenarios and understand the impacts of these scenarios on system performance.
See the Climate Change page for a more detailed description of how Confluence addresses these challenges.
Why Confluence?
Confluence is an innovative water resources planning tool specifically designed to serve the diverse planning needs of water resource planners and managers. It quickly and accurately simulates the operating characteristics of virtually any water supply and delivery system and provides maximum flexibility in testing alternative resource configurations and operating schemes. The model provides:
- Accurate simulations of the real-world operations of a local or regional water system.
- Flexibility to adapt to the unique features of each system.
- Extremely fast model runs to allow the evaluation and comparison of many strategy alternatives.
- Accessibility and comprehensibility to a wide audience.
- Detailed analyses and diagnostics.
- Evaluation and comparison of strategies against a variety of quantitative and qualitative criteria.
- Ability for the user to select the right level of detail.
The following pages will provide more information about Confluence and a better understanding of how it works. If you want to look more closely at Confluence, you will also be able to download a trial version of the model.
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