The RiverWare Study Manager and Research Tools (RiverSMART) is a software framework to facilitate the creation, execution, and archiving of RiverWare planning studies that compares the results of several scenarios representing differing hydrologic ensembles, demands, and strategies, such as operating policies and infrastructure alternatives. It manages the execution of the simulations to multiple processors, and keeps track of the output files for analysis. It can serve as an archiving structure to save the results of an entire study. The tool was designed and developed to address the needs of complex modeling studies that often explore options for meeting projected imbalances of future supplies and demands due to changing climate, water uses, and operating policies.

RiverSMART includes future supply scenarios produced by the Hydrology Simulator. The simulator uses non-parametric K-nearest-neighbor resampling techniques to generate ensembles of hydrologic traces based on historical data, optionally conditioned on long paleo reconstructed data using various Markov Chain techniques or conditioned on downscaled GCM projections to capture increased variability. Spatial and temporal disaggregation is also provided. The simulations produced are ensembles of hydrologic inputs to the RiverWare operations/infrastucture decision-modeling software.

Alternative demand scenarios can be produced with the Demand Input Tool, an Excel®-based tool that allows modifying future demands by groups such as states, sectors (e.g., agriculture, municipal, energy), and hydrologic basins. The demands can be scaled at future dates or changes ramped over specified time periods. Resulting data is imported directly into the decision model. Different model files can represent infrastructure alternatives and different Policy Sets represent alternative operating policies, including options for noticing when conditions point to unacceptable vulnerabilities, which trigger dynamically executing changes in operations or other options.

The over-arching Study Manager provides a graphical tool to create combinations of future supply scenarios, demand scenarios, infrastructure, and operating policy alternatives. Each scenario is executed as an ensemble of RiverWare runs, driven by the hydrologic supply. The Study Manager sets up and manages multiple executions on multi-core hardware. Outputs are typically direct model outputs, or post-processed indicators of performance based on model outputs. Post-processing statistical analysis of the outputs can be saved to the Graphical Policy Analysis Tool, netCDF, Tableau, or tailored outputs using R scripts. Archiving features are included.