Central Arizona Project - Service Area Model

Posted by Jason Lillywhite

GoldSim is being used by engineers and planners at Central Arizona Project to simulate water management in an area experiencing rapid growth coupled with uncertainties about future water supply, demand and reliability.

The Central Arizona Project Service Area Model (CAP:SAM) was developed by in-house staff using GoldSim software to simulate water demands for all major water using entities in the CAP three county Service Area, and the water supplies they use to meet their demands.  The model can be used to simulate a wide range of future conditions including variable rates and patterns of growth, shortage impacts, effluent reuse, aquifer recharge and recovery, and complex supply portfolio management decisions on an annual time step.

Modeling Runoff from Multiple Catchments using a Vector Splitter

Posted by Jason Lillywhite

If you have some flow of material or a transaction and need to divide it up or allocate it, likely you will use the Allocator or Splitter element in GoldSim. While these elements are very powerful and make the job a lot easier, there is one condition for which it was not specifically built: handling an array of input amounts. To address this, we have added some nice examples to our library that allow you to simulate allocations and splits on arrays of data. These examples provide an easy way to build powerful models that might have otherwise been quite difficult to build and maintain. I tested the array splitter example model using a real-world example that simulates rainfall runoff in a new stormwater management system, and this is described in this post.

American Water Resources Association 2015 Conference

Posted by Jason Lillywhite

I recently traveled to sunny Los Angeles, California for the AWRA 2015 Specialty Conference: "Water for Urban Areas: Managing Risks and Building Resiliency." All of the presentations I listened to were very interesting, some of which used GoldSim as the tool to facilitate the studies and results presented. The highlight of the trip, of course, was to visit with some of our customers and make new friends. I also learned more about some of the unique challenges California is facing due to continued population growth, climate change, water quality conditions, and aging infrastructures.