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POLICYFORUM combined with operations research, statistics, and welfare economics to formulate design problems as trade-offs of costs, risks, and benefits dependent on variables such as reservoir volume. These trade-offs were evaluated by optimizations or simulations using either long historical streamflow time series or stochastic simulations of streamflow based on properties of the historical time series.

This framework can be adapted to changing climate. Nonstationary hydrologic variables can be modeled stochastically to describe the temporal evolution of their pdfs, with estimates of uncertainty. Methods for estimating model parameters can be developed to combine historical and paleohydrologic measurements with projections of multiple climate models, driven by multiple climate-forcing scenarios. Rapid flow of such climate-change information from the scientific realm to water managers will be critical for …