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The State Water Project (SWP) is a multi-purpose water storage and delivery system that delivers water to 27 million Californians, 750,000 acres of farmland, and businesses throughout California. The SWP's water supply depends on various hydrologic, operational, and regulatory variables. To provide essential information about the SWP's current and projected future water supply reliability, the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) issues the Delivery Capability Report (DCR) every two years. The DCR is used extensively by SWP contractors and others for water resources planning and drought preparedness. The 2023 DCR draft is due by the end of December 2023 and will feature two updates to the data and methods used to model current conditions that have changed and will continue to evolve due to climate change. This talk will explore the two enhancements incorporated in the CalSim 3 model: the climate-adjusted historical hydrology and risk-informed future scenarios. The adjusted historical hydrology inputs simulate contemporary climate conditions to improve estimations of current SWP capability. Next, the new risk-informed future climate scenarios provide users with different levels of risk associated with quasi-probabilities of future climate states.
