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The Middle Rio Grande is a vital source of water for irrigation in the region. Climate change is impacting regional hydrology and is likely to put additional stress on a water supply that is already stretched thin. To gain insight on the hydrologic effects of climate change on reservoir storage, a simple water balance model was used to simulate the Elephant Butte-Caballo reservoir system (Southern New Mexico, USA). The water balance model was forced by hydrologic inputs generated by 97 climate simulations derived from CMIP5 Global Climate Models, coupled to a surface hydrologic model. Results suggest the percentage of years that reservoir releases satisfy agricultural water rights allocations over the next 50 years (2021-2070) will decrease compared to the past 50 years (1971-2020). The modeling also projects an increase in multi-year drought events that hinder reservoir management strategies to maintain high storage levels. In most cases, changes in reservoir inflows from distant upstream snowmelt is projected to have a greater influence on reservoir storage and water availability downstream of the reservoirs, compared to changes in local evaporation and precipitation from the reservoir surfaces.

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The interpretation and use of scientific models are relevant to public discourse and decision-making about future water scenarios. Tools to use these scientific models aim to facilitate understanding water systems; however, the information in these tools can be so vast, complex, and prone to uncertainties that users may find using some of these tools a cumbersome task. Users can be presented with numerous outputs, visualizations, and vocabulary that are irrelevant or do not align with their perspective (i.e., user role) in the water system under study. To address these issues, the SWIM platform extends the capabilities of traditional Web-based graphical interfaces to foster the use of scientific models, in particular, water sustainability models. With the integration of a recommender system and a dynamic interface, SWIM provides users with a list of prioritized outputs (i.e., modeling results) based on their perspective, to reduce the overload of data presented to users. Users are also provided with a range of output visualization graphs and narrative elements (i.e., contextual natural language descriptions) to support the interpretation of model results. The SWIM interface design provides a seamless high-level workflow for models developed in different modeling software tools and languages. The SWIM platform is designed to foster interoperability by providing open APIs and knowledge bases to access data, metadata, and models (i.e., Model-As-A-Service). This presentation highlights the key elements of SWIM that enable the interpretation of scientific model outputs from different perspectives and the interoperability features of this platform.

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