Accessible integration of agriculture, groundwater, and economic models using the Open Modeling Interface (OpenMI): methodology and initial results

Abstract

Abstract. Policy for water resources impacts not only hydrological processes, but the closely intertwined economic and social processes dependent on them. Understanding these process interactions across domains is an important step in establishing effective and sustainable policy. Multidisciplinary integrated models can provide insight to inform this understanding, though the extent of software development necessary is often prohibitive, particularly for small teams of researchers. Thus there is a need for practical methods for building interdisciplinary integrated models that do not incur a substantial development effort. In this work we adopt the strategy of linking individual domain models together to build a multidisciplinary integrated model. The software development effort is minimized through the reuse of existing models and existing model-linking tools without requiring any changes to the model source codes, and linking these components through the use of the Open Modeling Interface (OpenMI). This was found to be an effective approach to building an agricultural-groundwater-economic integrated model for studying the effects of water policy in irrigated agricultural systems. The construction of the integrated model provided a means to evaluate the impacts of two alternative water-use policies aimed at reducing irrigated water use to sustainable levels in the semi-arid grasslands overlying the Ogallala Aquifer of the Central US. The results show how both the economic impact in terms of yield and revenue and the environmental impact in terms of groundwater level

Effects of initial aquifer conditions on economic benefits from groundwater conservation

“…Moreover, we suggest that targeting groundwater management to producers whose well yields are most sensitive to further depletion is likely to result in greater welfare benefits than policies that are applied uniformly. Existing hydro‐economic models of groundwater management [e.g., Brozović et al ., ; Bulatewicz et al ., ; Athanassoglou et al ., ; Peterson and Saak , ; Steward et al ., ; Medellín‐Azuara et al ., ] do not capture adequately these important feedbacks between aquifer depletion, well yields, and agricultural productivity. We suggest that such models therefore will be unable to provide reliable insights about the distributional impacts of depletion, or about how policies to control groundwater use should be implemented spatially and temporally to maximize welfare benefits from limited groundwater resources.…”

“…Additionally, we assume that there is no relationship between the rate of recharge and irrigation pumping decisions due to the high level of irrigation efficiency in our study region. These assumptions are also consistent with previous hydro‐economic model analysis of groundwater management in the High Plains region [ Bulatewicz et al ., ; Mulligan et al ., ]. Aquifer hydraulic conductivity and specific yield are set equal to 30 m d −1 and 0.1, respectively, and both properties are assumed to be homogeneous.…”

A software framework for process flow execution of stochastic multi-scale integrated models

“…This initiation of the model run by the DynamicFramework is comparable to the OpenMI v1.4 trigger component (e.g. Becker and Schüttrumpf, 2011;Bulatewicz et al, 2010;Gregersen et al, 2007). First, the initial section of the main component is executed.…”

Quantifying the economic importance of irrigation water reuse in a Chilean watershed using an integrated agent-based model

“…Integrated and coupled hydro‐economic models are tools for understanding and quantifying the hydrological and economic effects of irrigation policies and management decisions [ Harou et al ., ; Bulatewicz et al ., ]. For a reliable assessment, they need to include a comprehensive and consistent water balance [ Perry , ; Molden et al ., ] and address the challenge of capturing the complex hydrologic and economic interactions in an irrigation system [ Arnold , ].…”