Within watersheds, social, economical, political and physical subsystems interact. While making decisions, decision makers should be aware of such interactions as any new policy will not only affect one subsystem. To see if a specific management policy is proper, an integrated study is needed of complicated water management system in the basin, considering major physical, social, economical and political aspects of it. System Dynamics provides a unique framework for integrating the disparate physical and social systems important to water resource management and can be used to comprehend the...

The high-elevation hydropower system in California is composed of more than 150 hydropower plants. The expected shift of runoff peak from spring to winter as a result of climate warming, resulting in snowpack reduction and earlier snowmelt, might have important effects on hydropower operations. Estimation of climate warming effects on such a large system by conventional simulation or optimization methods would be tedious and expensive. Employing optimization and cooperative game theory methods, this book presents a novel approach for modeling large hydropower systems and deriving climate...