Project Details
Overview/Objective
A changing climate is leading to increased stresses, variability, and uncertainty for water resources from reservoirs to river basins. However, continuing advances in monitoring, data sharing, supercomputing, modeling, and machine learning may offer a path for better informed complex watershed-scale decisions, particularly in underserved communities.
Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) are collaborating with members of the Internet of Water Coalition to assess gaps within the data gathering to decision-making process, and outline a path for creating intelligent watershed systems that digitally connect people and systems and interact with hydropower systems at a watershed scale.
Impact
ORNL and PNNL are already assessing sophisticated tools, such as hydropower digital twins, that may enable hydropower operators to predict optimum timing of operations for greater reliability and efficiency as well as determine when equipment should be updated or replaced. A variety of sources provide data describing inputs to these virtual models like current or projected future hydroclimate conditions or water and energy demands.
Intelligent Watersheds would have the necessary technical and institutional connections that allow key stakeholders, including hydropower operators and municipalities, to make smarter decisions and achieve better system performance for a variety of water resource and energy needs intersecting with hydropower, including irrigation and drinking water supplies, water quality, flood control, and energy generation.
Determining which efforts are most critical to developing Intelligent Watersheds will ultimately lead to better coordination among different sectors, and a greater resiliency to the U.S. power grid by enabling more efficient hydropower systems.
Next Steps
Anyone involved in water resource management is encouraged to engage with the research team to assess current informational and decision-making needs across five primary sectors – climate, water, environment, energy, and society. Throughout 2023, the team will host a series of virtual working group meetings to conduct a gap analysis, develop methods to assess watershed and system “intelligence,” and prioritize research and innovation actions.
In 2024, the team will facilitate a hybrid workshop to summarize key findings, test how suggested actions might be implemented within a case study watershed, and develop a roadmap that:
- Defines a vision for intelligent watersheds
- Formulates measures of watershed intelligence
- Prioritizes research and development goals
- Explores challenges to the implementation of intelligent watersheds
Get Involved
To join this effort, contact ORNL’s Carly Hansen at hansench@ornl.gov or PNNL’s Vincent Tidwell at vincent.tidwell@pnnl.gov.
Collaborators
Internet of Water Coalition: Faith Sternlieb
PNNL: Vince Tidwell, Nathalie Voisin, Kyle Larson, Andrew White, Maruti Madunuru
