Water Resource Systems Modeling: Its Role in Planning and Management

Planning, designing, and managing water resource systems today inevitably involve impact prediction. Impact prediction can be aided by the use of models. While acknowledging the increasingly important role of modeling in water resource planning and management, we also acknowledge the inherent limitation of models as representations of any real system. Model structure, input data, objectives, and other assumptions related to how the real system functions or will behave under alternative infrastructure designs and management policies or practices may be controversial or uncertain. Future events are always unknown and of course any assumptions about them may affect model outputs, i.e., their predictions. As useful as they may be, the results of any quantitative analysis are always only a part of the information that should be considered by those involved in the overall planning and management decision-making process.