Assessing water availability under a water rights priority system

The Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission, its partner agencies, a nd contractors are conducting a statewide Water Availability Modeling (WAM) Project pursuant to Senate Bill 1 enacted by the Texas Legislature in 1997 . The Water Rights Analysis Package (WRAP) is the river basin:water managem ent simulation model used in the WAM Project. WRAP provides flexible capabi lities for analyzing water availability and reliability under a priority-ba sed water allocation system. The water management and use requirements mode led may be quite complex, involving numerous water users governed by variou s institutional arrangements and configurations of water control facilities . WRAP may be applied to essentially any river basin whether in Texas or el sewhere. This paper describes both the generalized WRAP model and the Texas WAM Project.