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David Neumann presented at the 2026 ASCE World Environmental & Water Resources Congress (EWRI), held April 26–29 in Mobile, Alabama. The presentation: Development of an Operations and Accounting Decision Support Toolset of the North Platte River in Wyoming and Nebraska was delivered on April 28.

This talk presented a unified RiverWare-based decision support system for the North Platte basin that improves data management, transparency, and operational efficiency through integrated forecasting, accounting, automation, and user-friendly interfaces.  Co-authoring the talk was Dr. Edith Zagona. David Merrill and Lauren Thatch at Reclamation provided input and comments.

The full abstract:

In the North Platte River Basin in Wyoming, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation must balance irrigation and water supply demands, flow targets, flood control operations, ownership constraints, and other operating objectives. To operate the system of seven reservoirs, the team uses a suite of tools for day-to-day operations, accounting, mid-term forecasting and long-range planning that consists of multiple spreadsheets, a legacy FORTRAN program, and many files to transfer data. The process can be time consuming with multiple potentials for error. We present a new decision support toolset, implemented in RiverWare, that can be used for these purposes. This unified tool provides improved data management, transparency, and maintainability. We show how the tool can be used to track observed flows and volumes, forecast operations, and account for the ownership of water. We will describe the use of “system accounts” that are used to track the overall ownership of the three projects in the basin and how the water is distribute to each reservoir. We show how the model can be run using scripts and other automation tools for different forecasted inflows. A utility of note is the System Control Table, an intuitive operator interface, used to view data and make overrides if the computed operations need to be adjusted. We’ll also show features including the graphical outputs from the toolset such as plots, reports, and diagrams. We’ll describe plans to add more detailed accounting and enhance the model to run a longer range for planning purposes. Once completed and tested, this new decision support toolset will benefit Reclamation by reducing the overall time and person-hours to operate the system while providing a more flexible, powerful, and intuitive modern interface.