Okay, great. I think we are just about ready to go. So thank you all for attending. We're really excited for today's event and our panelists who are here. We have one panelist who sent in a video and maybe joining us later, but he's currently traveling in Saudi Arabia. So we planned this event to celebrate this year or this past year. We hit 50,000 users, 50K users in the Weep Forum. We knew it was going to be happening sometime last year. We didn't know exactly when, but Jack tracks this information as we go along. And so we had an idea more or less. It happened. Jack, do you remember exactly the date? October? I think it was October 28th. Okay. So yeah, October 28th just towards the end of the year. And then it also just so happens. Weep was created in 1989. And so 2024 is the 35th anniversary of our Weep tool, the water evaluation and planning tool. And so we're really excited to be promoting our software and then also just celebrating with users, potential users, and our expert users who are on our panel. Here on the line, we have Malina Balderama, Kamiya Gavichi and Jerry Grussollo. And then we also have David Yates sent in a video and hopefully he will also be joining us later. But we will see based on his internet connection. And so without further ado, Jack's going to introduce a little bit more about our software. We also have Lindsay on here for technical and communication support. She's their communication expert here at the US Water Center of the Stockholm Environment Institute. So Jack, if you want to take us away. Sure. Thank you, Marina. I've prepared a short video presentation about Weep's history and highlights. But before we show that, I'd like to let you know about an initiative we have in support of capacity building in Africa. At SEI's water program, we believe that sustainable change can only be achieved by empowering communities and building their capacity to address water and food security challenges effectively. Our holistic approach combines knowledge sharing and community engagement to create lasting impact. Please consider making a donation today to help building capacity in Africa to enable communities to champion a more equitable and resilient future. And I'll put the link here in the chat window for you. Thank you. So while we're putting up the video, if people want to put in the chat where they're joining us from and maybe if you're a Weep user and who you work with or how you use Weep, something like that. So just to get an idea of where everyone's coming from, we'd love to see it. And with that, Lindsay, do you want to go ahead and put on our... In recognition of Weep's 35th anniversary and a reaching the milestone of 50,000 users, we offer a retrospective of important steps in the evolution of Weep, highlighting several important features. My name is Jack Sieber, and I've been managing the development of Weep here at SEI for the past 31 years. Throughout the past 35 years, we've been continually improving Weep, adding capabilities and features, increasing speed and robustness, improving the website and training materials, and expanding connections with users worldwide. While this video is very fast-paced, we will post it on our website so that you can view it again at your own pace. Weep was initially developed in 1989 by the Stockholm Environment Institute for its internal use. SEI released the first public version in 1991. In the days before Microsoft Windows or the Internet, these early versions were DOS-based, with barely any graphical user interface, and only rudimentary data controls, tables, and charts. Nonetheless, Weep provided a structured approach to integrated demand supply analysis. The first application modeled the rapidly diminishing ARL-C, along with policy scenarios for potential remediation. The following screens show the look and feel of these early versions, including drop-down menus, data screens, tables, and charts. The schematic was built as a list, not spatially explicit. There was only one main river, and only it could have tributaries. Result visualizations were fairly limited. By the late 90s, Weep had created a graphical drag-and-drop interface to build the schematic, although there were no background layers, shapefiles, or ability to zoom in and out. Result visualizations had improved, including an overview with multiple charts. In these screenshots, you can see how the interface has changed and improved. In 2000, SEI created the first Windows version, with a GIS-based interface for creating the schematic, sophisticated data expression language for building models, and a linear program solver for allocating demands and supplies across multiple levels of rivers and tributaries. Beyond a simple accounting framework for demands and supplies, it included a physically-based hydrology for simulating rainfall runoff and infiltration, and modules for financial planning, and water quality in wastewater reuse. Results could be displayed on the map, and the interface was translated into French, Korean, Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese. Weep can display most of its results on the schematic. This can provide an easy way to visualize how results vary across time and space. Here we can see how the relative magnitude of the various demands and how they vary within each year and across years, including transmission and return flows that shows which supplies are active. And finally, including stream flow, makes it clear the major flows in the system. Over 80 volunteers have helped translate the Weep software and website into 28 different languages. This has helped make it easier to use and more accessible around the world. In the late 2000s, Weep gained links to external models for groundwater, mod flow, and water quality, Qual2k, and an Application Programming Interface, or API, enabled scripting in Python, JavaScript, or Visual Basic to automate Weep or build linkages to external models and software. Modules were added for rice paddies, infiltration basins, and retention ponds, and combined sewer overflow and translations for Arabic, Farsi, Russian, and Thai. In addition to its built-in groundwater model, Weep could be linked to the widely used USGS mod flow groundwater model with connections to Weep's demand sites, catchments, groundwater nodes, rivers, and reservoirs. Here you can see a 3D representation of groundwater levels at a high spatial resolution. The 2010s brought many important changes to Weep, which you can see listed here. Weep's Scenario Explorer presents a high-level overview of your model. Think of it as a dashboard with controls and gauges where you can control key model inputs and instantly see how those changes affect results. The user creates the dashboard by adding the most important inputs and outputs. Here we are looking at the sensitivity of the results to reservoir size in the Weeping River Basin. We can easily create new scenarios for smaller and larger reservoirs and compare them to the original scenario. For integrated water energy NEXAS studies, Weep can be linked to LEAP, SEI's energy planning software. This simple example explores connections with hydropower, water sector electricity demands, and electricity sector water demands. Data and results can flow in a feedback loop between the two models, providing insights only available in a combined model. Weep can export schematics and results to Google Earth. This provides a powerful and convenient way to package the results from a Weep analysis to share with others. Each element is clickable, showing any notes from Weep. Everything is saved in one file that can be sent via email or posted on a website for others to download and open in Google Earth. Results can be exported in two formats, as slides in an animation, or as individual charts for each schematic element. The user chooses which results to include for export for each element. Here we see supply requirements and unmet demand, and reservoir levels. The late 2010s saw another batch of very significant changes shown here, perhaps the most important being automatic catchment delineation. Weep can automatically delineate catchments and rivers using digital elevation data, calculate land area, measure by elevation band and land cover, and download climate data for each catchment and elevation band. This greatly simplifies the process of setting up and modeling catchment hydrology. Weep automatically downloads global data sets for elevation, land cover, and climate as needed. The user can also use their own data sets for land use or climate. Weep calculates the spatially weighted average for each user-defined elevation band for each climate variable. Here we can see how precipitation, temperature, relative humidity, and wind speed differ by elevation, as well as variation within each year and across years. It is easy to later modify your choices, such as subdividing the basin into different catchments, changing pour points or river head flow locations, or changing which climate or land use data set to use. Weep will recalculate area and climate based on the new boundaries. In this case, we subdivided the Sacramento basin into two catchments, representing the two major sub watersheds in the basin. Here are the major changes so far in the current decade. Weep now includes access to the latest CMIP-6 Global Gridded Climate Scenarios, representing daily climate projections out to 2100 for 27 global climate models and four shared socioeconomic pathways. The automatic catchment delineation can automatically download and apply any of these 108 data sets, spatially averaging them for each catchment and elevation band. This makes it very easy to build scenarios comparing multiple possible future climates. Weep can automatically create a new shapefile that summarizes the climate for each climate grid square in your basin. The summary includes monthly and annual averages for each climate variable. The layer is added as a background layer on the schematic. By displaying a summary attribute as a thematic map, for example, average temperature or precipitation, you can quickly see how the climate varies across the basin. Show info charts to see all months for the location under the mouse. Weep can calculate scenarios in parallel to greatly speed up calculations. In this demo, we are calculating 16 scenarios, four in each of the four separate copies of Weep. Once each copy is finished calculating, it sends the results back to the main instance of Weep for display. Weep can automatically download and display background maps from several internet sources, such as USGS, OpenStreetMap, Google, National Geographic, and Esri. These include satellite images, street maps, and topographic maps, and can be very helpful when building your Weep model. Once you have chosen a layer, you can pan and zoom on the schematic and Weep will download and display the background tiles. While we have always been driven in our Weep development by user needs, we do also have our own ideas for future improvements. While my to-do list is nearly endless, major tasks include the ability to publish the scenario explorer view to web-based dashboards for online exploration, collaborative model building for teams like Google Docs, help streamline and automate our robust decision support stakeholder process, increased access to public databases, such as soil, climate, water demands, and reservoirs, and building serious games for interactive Weep-based simulations with stakeholders. We are currently working to move Weep's scenario explorer to the web, where online visitors could see how changing data assumptions might impact results without the need to install Weep on their computer. Over the past 35 years, more than 1,000 papers using Weep have been published by SCI and other researchers. Here is a simple spatial analysis of many of those publications. And finally, I want to thank all the people and institutions that have supported and used Weep over the past 35 years, including developers, collaborators, funders, trainers, translation volunteers, and everyday users. Weep would not be as powerful or as easy to use as it is today without your help and feedback. Thank you so much, Jack, for creating that video. Just as a note, and I see in the chat, people are interested. We are posting the video on our website, and so we'll put the link to that on the Weep website, and so we'll put the link to that in the chat, and then it will also be available from now on there. I just want to also note now that we've gotten everybody's or many of your responses, we have just as we have our Weep Forum members from all over the world, we also have a huge representation today at this event, Columbia, Mexico, Kenya, India, the Netherlands, Tajikistan, the list goes on and on, Iran, it's really great to see Zimbabwe. We're really, really happy to hear in California where one of our US offices is located, also in Seattle. Our comms support Lindsay, and then of course our panel as well from different regions in the world. So we're really excited to see you all here. And we also wanted to share a couple of video testimonials of some of our user base that we requested for this event. So we have a second video that talks a little bit about some of our users' personal experiences with Weep and how they've used it over the years. So Lindsay, if you can throw that up there. Weep allows me to model different river basins and entire water and resources systems for research and propose strategies to improve water resources management in Peru. Weep helps me understand the complexity and provides solutions to solve water resources management problems in river basins. My favorite features are the hydrological model in using the soil moisture method and the reservoir management. The idea is how we can analyze the behavior of the basins under climate change. How it's going to change the hydrological dynamics of the basins, for example, under climate change under no stationary conditions. And what kind of policies we need to implement to manage the reservoirs, the water resources system in general. Thank you very much, Jat, for the invitation to give this word for everybody. Thank you. That project I chose Weep because it includes modules for snow and particularly for glacier representation, which is not so common in water resources systems modeling tools. This work allowed me to provide recommendations on adaptation measures to improve the provision of freshwater ecosystem services and the conservation of endangered aquatic species in mountain environments. The things that I like more about Weep, one has to be the advanced programming interface that has allowed me to explore the benefits of considering additional processes, for example, glacier processes through the incorporation of new calculations. So congratulations, Weep Tim. We organized a small water parliament with around 100 seats which brings together the decision makers, the water users and the state services. And my job is to make sure that these people have the technical key to take the best decision for water management today and in the future. We decided to make a Weep model to make easier the discussion in this parliament and to bring scientific matter to the discussion. I can say that there is a real gain to use a Weep model. The most important gain is, I think, the improvement of collective knowledge and the standing of water resources uses infrastructure, derivation and the management and the water allocation today. And the best way to discuss what has to be the water allocation in the future. I think the second advantage of a Weep model is the credibility because it's a scientific approach. We have a numeric model that brings together a lot of data related to water management and as we are a neutral organization, it's important and it gives us a good credibility. Thank you. Weep has transformed my work as well as the work at my organization for Valley Water's long-term water supply planning. I've seen Weep be most effective in a recent effort by Valley Water to evaluate proposed reservoir operating rules in three main watersheds in our area that are intended to mainly benefit anonymous fish in our local streams while balancing our water supply needs. We worked with SEI to add custom parameters that calculate dozens of fish habitat metrics through various life stages that are based on flow and channel geometry at key points of interest downstream of several reservoirs. This Weep daily model allowed Valley Water to evaluate multiple proposed operating rule scenarios and select a preferred scenario that is now moving to actual implementation. For me, this is the most valuable thing that Weep has provided for us a way to evaluate scenarios and provide a basis for the selection of a preferred set of operating rules. I honestly don't know how we would have been able to move forward without Weep. I always appreciate that SEI is working to add functionality to Weep and for me personally, I just want to thank everyone at SEI for the great support over more than 10 years. Our experience of using Weep goes back to around 15 years ago during our master's program at the University of Tehran. Back then, we were using Weep in our class projects trying to understand its different capabilities. When we moved to U.S. to do our fellowship at UC Davis we had a chance to work at SEI. That's when we better understood how powerful this tool is, how it can be used to address sector conflicts, how it can be used to do the decision-making and support the decision-making and how it helps cross-sectoral communication. Using Weep has really helped us to shape our mind around integrated water system analysis, how different components are connected and how they affect each other. Working in SEI gave us the opportunity to get to know the developer team of this powerful program. We realized how lovely and nice people they are who are constantly trying to work on improving and upgrading this tool. Our collaboration and relationship continued even after leaving Davis to the time that we were in Sweden for a postdoc or now that we are in Australia. They have been great mentors, colleagues and friends for us. Fantastic. Thank you, Lucy. I think as you all can see there's a broad use of Weep. There are many different types of users. Also, as we can see in the chat we're so excited to be able to provide a tool that can reach so many different kinds of users and for so many different types of applications. Now we're going to move on to our panel of experts. I did want to note one thing in the chat. There are some very specific technical questions. I think one form also to look for answers to these types of questions is exactly our Weep forum on the Weep website. Oftentimes people have similar issues or questions to you and so you can check that out. And then also we do have a lot of training opportunities through and Jack just put it in the chat. We do also have a lot of training opportunities through SEI, US and our other SEI Stockholm Environment Institute centers. And so if you are interested in those you can follow us on our social media and we announce those periodically. And then there's also individual and then it's also available there on our website through the training link. And as a multinational organization we do work with projects all over the world and specifically for anything from academic institutions to government agencies to private applications. And so definitely get in touch with us if you are looking for kind of larger project applications for applying Weep. And so now we're going to move over to some of the questions that we've been through. Some of these applications that and relationships that we have built at SEI, US over the years and our panel of experts. We're going to start with Malina Balderama who is a coordinator for our Bolivia Water Sanitation and Hygiene Thinking Connected to Hydrology or Bolivia Watch Program. So if you can Malina go ahead and take it away. Thank you very much to everyone. For me it's a very pleasure to keep in touch with the Weep developers team and also with the SEI family. I will please to present my experience working in Bolivia Watch Program. As a context, Bolivia is in the center of South America with a territorial extension of more than one million of square kilometers. Its population is about 12 million in habitat. It participates in three macro basins, the Alplata, Amazonian and the Rake. The water availability is more than 49,000 cubic meters per capita per year. And the water consumption per capita is 2.14 cubic meters per year. However, even that we are in the top 20 countries with more availability of water, we have many challenges to manage the water in a fair, inclusive, equitable and intelligent way. Some illustrative comparisons with Egypt with a similar surface of Egypt where Bolivia has 20, Egypt has 20 times the population of Bolivia and almost a tenth of the water availability. Despite these, we are going to share our main challenges in water management. Let's see our challenges. 87% of Bolivian citizens have access to drinking water, less than 65% have access to sanitation. Just 570,000 of hectareas are under irrigation systems. 20, 70% of Bolivian citizens have access to hand washing facilities and water in their homes. 58% households have wastewater treatment. Just 1% of the renewable water is extracted considering ecological flow. Just 52% of the water resources are under integrated water resource management. Just 66% of our international waters have agreements and 16% of the water resources are suffering rapid changes affecting the ecosystem. In terms of SDG number six, during the last years, we are just moderately improving and we are not going to accomplish our goals until the 2030 agenda. And these are some of the reasons why Bolivia Watch program exists. We connect the basings planning with sanitation and our challenges to have fairly and more equitable management of the water. Bolivia Watch program is a project from SEI portfolio financed by Swedish cooperation and requested by the Ministry of Environment and Water of Bolivia. Its mission focuses on producing basing master's plans as resource planning management instruments based on the use of the WIP tool to reduce uncertainties. Bolivia Watch works in three basings with complex problems such as mining activities, the dynamic not resolved are originate from the rural and urban areas interactions and the pressures on sanitation and drinking water systems in which an important part of the population in Bolivia is concentrated. The three basings are ISA, Pampawari and La Paz. And also in the framework of our program we study the impact of fires in the water resource in the more specific ecosystem that is called Chiquitania, that is part of the Amazonic region. We work with the master basing plans as tools that are designed to know the current situation of the basing at the level of the hydroclimatic, social, economic and territorial information. Based on this information, the plans design strategies for intervention actions that improve the access and equitable use of the water in quantity and quality. Therefore, the BMPs, that is basing master plans, start from a technical process based on the information that we can collect from primary and second resources. The starting line from the formulation of the basing master's plans in Bolivia is information contained in the modeling of the National Water Balance. That study is carried out with WIP2. WIP and the four additional tools were coupled to strengthen the compensiveness of the study of the hydrological, social and ecosystem dynamics of the study of the started basings. With the framework of Bolivia Watch Program, the five tools that we call the SEI Toolbox for Water Planning and Integrated was integrated for the first time, which reduces with the proposed to reduce the uncertainties with the generation of Robles decision-making scenarios and promotes the dialogue among the actors who were supported by the results of the scientific-technical interaction of the tools. The five tools are shown in this slide that are WIP in the central, because it is the core, WAAT, REBAM, WASHFLOWS, and MTDP. Let's try to explain a very brief description of that couple tools. WAAT, Watershed Topology Tool allows to include the analysis of the altitudinal gradient between its low, medium, and high basing areas that has influence on the temperature, precipitation, evaporation, speed of surface run-out due to the slope of the basings and others. WASHFLOWS allows WIP to provide scaling of water supply and demand at the household's level. Users of drinking water and sanitation systems are represented by very small consumption scales with respect to the scale of the hydrodynamics units of a basin. These tools allow to integrate disintegration in both demand flows, outputs, and supply flows, the entries, in a circular approach that considers water reuse. REBAM is another tool that is coupled to WIP to calculate the recovery value of nutrients for agriculture that comes from domestic wastewater. The results are useful for decision makers who will promote the wastewater treatment and its reuse. And finally, the MTDP that is coming from the Spanish acronym that means Model for Decision-Making Participatory Process. It's a tool that facilitates the dialogue and the participation of the stakeholders. It's applying the process for assessment of the intervention actions and for defining the action strategies. It has three main components. First, these analytical tools. The second indicator for visualization interface. And three, the decision panel. WIP and additional tools created by ACI improve a planning process in the management water resources in Bolivia, making planning process more equitable, failure, and with less uncertainty. This allows that the basins improve their conditions and the basins in habitants will improve their quality of life. In addition, the basins stakeholders will exercise the governance based on a knowledge and scientific evidence. That's why we are so pleased to use that kind of instruments, that kind of tools that allows to Bolivia to improve and to reduce the gaps that I present at the beginning of my presentation. Thank you very much and this is our contribution. Thank you so much, Melina. And it's so exciting to see all the applications and connections that we can make with other tools as well and in the development of tools. We really appreciate everything that you've done in facilitating that connection to Government of Bolivia and the planning of water resources in Bolivia. So now we're going to move on to Kamir Kiveci, who is the Manager of Division Planning with the California Department of Water Resources, DWR. So I'm going to share presentation now. You can hear me? Yep, we can hear you all right. Thank you. So good morning everyone or maybe good evening and night depending on where you are around the world. I'd like to thank Marina and the SEI Davis California team for this invitation and opportunity to join this webinar and share with you our work at the Department of Water Resources in California on the California Water Plan and more recently on analyses supporting the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. I also want to thank all the participants for joining today. It is quite impressive all the different countries who are represented in this event. DWR has used the WEAP model for our future scenario planning for the California Water Plan as well as the SIGMA or Sustainable Groundwater Management analyses and it's been founded or based on a partnership and technical collaboration with SEI in Davis, California for about 18 years and spanning four updates of the California Water Plan. Next slide please. So I'd like to share with folks that the California Water Plan the first one that DWR published was in 1957. That's the year I was born so we're the same age. I'm actually one month older and over the history of the California Water Plan which includes 13 updates the focus of each update has evolved depending on the conditions and the focus and needs of the state of California. So early on the focus was resource extraction for the purpose of socio-economic growth then during the fifties and seventies extensive water infrastructure expansion and then during the seventies on there were unintended environmental consequences from that resource extraction approach and development and environmental protections and regulations to begin to reverse some of those adverse effects. More recently the focus of water management in California has been integrated water management, watershed resilience and sustainability and then really looking seriously at climate adaptation and environmental justice in our water management system. So the most recent update, the 2023 the final plan should be coming out in the next few weeks and the three themes of this update is climate urgency and adaptation, watershed resilience and equity in water management. Next slide please. So the water plan updates in the 21st century over the last 20 some years has really been transformative and pioneered a number of innovations and that includes expanded participation and transparency of how the plan is made and who gets to help inform it looking seriously at climate change impacts and how to adapt to it. Integrated watershed management as the approach for really integrating the various water management sectors from headwater to groundwater to outflow environmental stewardship and recognizing that our natural and green infrastructure is an important part of water management and has to be treated that way. Also making sure that we manage our water in a way that increases resilience and sustainability from all aspects environment, economy and equity and then recognizing that the water plan while it is important for informing water policies and decisions is a strong technical foundation in its data analysis and research and development recommendations. So for all the reasons you've already heard in the great video and the testimonials and the panel discussions, the WEAP model really seamlessly fit all of these major priorities that we have had over the last couple of decades. Next slide please. So it has been a journey over this time prior to using the WEAP model, DWR as part of the requirement of the water plan has to look at future supply and demand conditions and water management and in the past prior to WEAP we used multiple and separate models for trying to do that we did not include and they could not really accommodate climate change analysis at that time. So our first application of WEAP was to develop what we call the hydrologic region, WEAP model that covers all 10 hydrologic regions of California and just you appreciate each of those 10 hydrologic regions are the size of other states and some countries and they are very different in their conditions and priorities. So what these hydrologic region model enabled us to do was to focus on urban agricultural and environmental water demands including how they would be affected by climate change. So we included in the 2009 water plan update analysis using three demographic scenarios around different levels of population growth up through 2050. We had our historical hydrology as our baseline plus 12 climate change scenarios coming downscaled global climate model scenarios. Next slide please. Now the hydrologic region model being at the very large course scale did not enable us to do water supply scenarios. So for the 2013 update we worked with SEI and other partners such as RAN Corporation and NCAR to develop what we call the Central Valley Planning Area WEAP model shown on this slide. So that covers three of the hydrologic regions. The reason they're of significance and why we focused on them first and foremost is because they include the two largest rivers of California, the Sacramento River and the San Joaquin River and their tributaries as well as the Tulare Lake region in the southern section there. That is one of our largest agricultural production regions of California. Now by going to the Central Valley Planning Area model we were able to simulate both water demand and water supplies and for 2013 update of the water plan we increased our demographic scenarios to nine again through 2050 and we used the same climate 12 climate change scenarios based on global climate model downscaling. For 2018 water plan we pretty much updated that analysis using the most recent global climate model projections or scenarios up through 2100 so we increased our time horizon through 2100. Next slide please. So for the 2023 update of the water plan our biggest innovation was moving toward what we call decision scaling climate vulnerability assessment and this is a risk based approach for climate vulnerability and it enables us to not only look at the range of variation based on climate but also the probabilities of occurrence of that and so in doing that we actually simulated 43 different 42 different climate scenarios plus our baseline and each one of them for 1100 years of analysis using the WEAP model. Now to do that we work with the SEI team at Davis to make code modifications and data input and output modifications so that anyone using the WEAP model throughout the world can now also apply decision scaling risk based climate analysis to your work. Next slide please. So by moving from a downscaled global climate change model approach to including and adding to it a decision scaling approach we moved from just being able to look at time series of analysis to risk based insights looking at 2020 as our current condition and 2070 as our future level of development and we can then generate these contour maps looking at variations of temperature looking on the surface and variation in precipitation both less than current and more than current. Next slide. Thank you. So for the 2023 update these are two of the figures that appear in the water plan. So the one on the left is a spider plot that demonstrates the probability of increased vulnerability for six core parameters that we selected to present and the three different color bands are one for each of those three hydrologic regions the Sacramento Valley the San Joaquin Valley and the Tulare Lake hydrologic region. The figures bar charts to the right show the magnitude of change for those six parameters for each of those three hydrologic regions both for what is possible probable for the 2040 time range or time domain and what could be possible for by 2070. Next slide please. So I mentioned that we also used weep to support the implementation of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. One of the provisions of that act was directing the Department of Water Resources to determine or estimate how much water is available in each of the 10 hydrologic regions for the purpose of groundwater recharge and aquifer replenishment. So let me just note if you don't know that the Sigma Act went into effect about 10 years ago and that was for the first time that the state of California had oversight or has oversight over groundwater management in California. So the DWR team using weep developed weep models for each of the 10 hydrologic regions to look at the natural flow variability and estimating how much water would be available for groundwater recharge. Next slide. So all of this work is based on many, many, many hours and effort by many people presented on this slide. I also want to note that the Water Plan Statewide Water Analysis Network or SWAN was a technical advisory committee that over helped us in our weep development and in our weep implementation. Next slide and I think that's my last slide. Thank you very much. Perfect. Thank you so much Kamir and as you all can see that weep has been used in many different applications at statewide water and surface water and groundwater management and we are so excited to be able to work with DWR over the years and continue that work going forward and hopefully we'll also have some more news about how we have used weep and how DWR has used weep coming soon so we'll be providing more details in other communications materials going forward. And yes, we will include the contact information for all of our speakers on the event page and then also their information is up there so you can visit their institutional websites from the event page. Just as a reminder, we're going to be doing a Q&A session at the end of the panelist presentations so if you have questions, I can see your hands are raised but also if you want to go ahead and put them in the Q&A window you can write your questions there and then we can definitely get to those at the end of the presentations. So now we're going to have our David Yates, he's currently traveling so he's unable to make it today but he'll be David Yates is our presenter from he's a scientist in the research applications laboratory at NCAR which is the National Center for Atmospheric Research and he's located normally in Boulder, Colorado so Lindsay if you can go ahead and Hi, good morning, good afternoon, good evening whatever time zone you might find yourself in pleasure being here as part of this event that is acknowledging this threshold of more than 50,000 users as part of the WEAP forum. I thought this was a good time to kind of pause and reflect a little bit about where we've come with WEAP and perhaps think a little bit about where we might put it into the future so pleasure to be part of this event. I'm David Yates, I'm a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado but probably more importantly for this event I'm also an associate of the Stockholm Environment Institute so I'm just going to spend you know five, six minutes here talking a little bit about my experience with WEAP. I don't have no slides to you know set of points here that I'm going to use as a reminder as I talk through having to record this because I'm traveling so worried that I might not have internet access so I don't know if anybody's ever done these kinds of recordings they're not easy so I'll do my best here. So just want to take a minute to sort of acknowledge some of my collaborators if I can move it forward. David Perkey who's now the Latin America director in Bogota, Colombia Chuck Young and Brian Joyce and Annette Huber Lee who I've worked with over the last more than 20 years on thinking about how to use and apply WEAP for integrated water resources management and then special sort of a special recognition of Jack Sieber who you know is really the brains behind WEAP as the lead software engineer and developer who none of us would be working on WEAP without Jack so thanks Jack for all you've done in advancing WEAP and hopefully us scientists have been a big part of helping envision some of the aspects of it as well so just tell a little history of my work with WEAP I had this marker in September 11th 2001 where I found myself in Davis, California where we had a new EPA project and I think Annette was there and David Perkey was there and this was a project around it kind of looking at the vulnerabilities impact and adaptation options of climate change and this was kind of where we envisioned what we affectionately called the green dot object in WEAP for those that are familiar with WEAP as an object based model we have all sorts of different of object types you know demand objects, river objects the green dot object is the catchment object where attributes of the watershed exist and where climate variables can go in and you know this one could argue that some of the success of WEAP over the last 20 years was the introduction of the green dot because instead of water systems models the boundary condition being reservoir excuse me river flows it can now be a climate data climate time series where we have a physical hydrology representation of the watershed and then we have time series of precipitation, temperature and run physical hydrology and generate stream flow that gets into the river object that gets moved to the reservoir object and where we can manage water so that was the EPA project where this notion of integration of physical hydrology within the water system water management system first was realized this project in California this EPA project led to quite a bit of additional work in California where you know where the merits of WEAP as this sort of integrating modeling platform was realized so we did you know worked with several different agencies organizations throughout California where WEAP again as a more of a generic water systems modeling tool was really exemplified in fact if you look at a lot of the publications you see applications around ecosystem services for example this is also a time where we started to work with water utilities just mentioned one the El Dorado irrigation district it was really an interesting project where we used WEAP to look at drought plans and you know really did some econometric modeling with WEAP and really demonstrated that WEAP is really yes it's water centric but it's really a generic water systems modeling tool so in fact I've always prided myself to think to say that there's never been a water problem I haven't solved really with WEAP because it allows this flexibility of being able to create relationships and you know call it models of models and so you know even within the work with El Dorado irrigation district and their drought plans we did an econometrics model where we looked at the monetization of drought plans it was also during this time where we started working with Department of California Department of Water Resources Kamiar who's also a part of our the forum here today and worked with contributed to the California water plan and again the merits of WEAP as this integrating tool where climate change could be integrated into the analysis was put forward I think that was around 2008 where SEI made a strong contribution to the water plan using WEAP let's see California's water plan so those are some of the kind of highlights of projects that highlighted again the integrated nature of WEAP, the flexibility of WEAP we also started that time to do quite a bit of international work one of the things that I think makes WEAP novel in both of its its elegant simplicity but also its ability to be very sophisticated and we've demonstrated that with doing building very simple models of very simple water systems to very complex water systems I'd say during this time too one element that you can call so WEAPers acknowledged was the challenge of data processing a lot of this work in the late 2008 through 2015 a lot of the pre-processing of data sets was centered around the use of GIS tools to generate watershed attributes catchment boundaries creating climate time series was done outside of WEAP and so it was long it's been maybe eight years maybe not that long where again the genius of Jack super shined and the development of the catchment delineation tool and I think this kind of capability this kind of innovation that has been part of the continual advancement of WEAP really for more than 30 years under Jack's leadership has led to this large community of users because it keeps innovating it keeps advancing and things like the catchment delineation tool have been fundamental to that the catchment delineation tool then also acknowledged the need to be able to link to these grid and data sets give an example here of net CDF which is a standard in the atmospheric sciences for a data standard for storing geographic data of any sort and WEAP Jack and the team the WEAP team made this link of being able to take net CDF files in addition to the catchment delineation tool and so now in WEAP instead of having to do a lot of GIS preprocessing we can use tools like the catchment delineation tool to develop our data sets and I really find that this capability allows kind of this rapid development of data sets that can be used in the WEAP framework and now the analysts like the model builder can spend more time building the model than building data sets a really powerful WEAP advancement and this again was even in the last couple years Jack has linked to large data sets like the climate model inner compares in the CMAP data sets so we've got this global data set and so again allowing almost anybody in the world to be able to take WEAP and quickly build a WEAP model of their application say you know I find the one of my favorite sayings is a model useful and easy to use and I think that's one of WEAP's greatest merits is that you know going and having trained people on how to use WEAP it quickly is tangible to folks they quickly get the context they get how it works and they can get up and running and building their model quickly even though it might be a simple model and yet WEAP then also allows a real the ability to build really complex models as well you know the powerful application programming interface is really made building models of models very useful and again for this range of a novice user to a moderate user to what we call power users we perform all that kind of that range of applicability say you know what's next with WEAP I'll just take a minute to just muse a little bit about some of the things that are going on even in the water resources planning world I was at AGU in December in San Francisco where there were for the hydrology session they had to have multiple sessions because there was so much interest in machine learning and AI and I think that's a big frontier for WEAP this idea of bringing in machine learning algorithms and processes into the system one of the things that is a barrier is that we do need to make this transition from the software side for being a 32-bit architecture to a 64-bit architecture where then we can take advantage of some of the like Python packages again one of the powerful things is application programming interface the ability to use Python for example to build models of models couple other sort of application areas you know WEAP I'd love to see WEAP we call it a planning model but I think also the idea of WEAP perhaps even for flood early warning tools for doing flood forecasting I don't see any reason why WEAP could not handle that problem in fact recently I've been working with Jack to move or have a time step that is subdaily so we've been able to go down to time steps as short as 20 minutes to address you know reservoir inflows or flash not flash flooding problems but flooding problems perhaps you know forecast the FIRO the forecast and form reservoir operations which I think need time steps as you know shorter than a day so those are some things that I think would love to see WEAP advance towards again you know AI, machine learning and subdaily time steps so with that I will end my presentation hopefully I'll be able to be online for the discussion but happy to see where WEAP has come and looking forward to its future thank you Fantastic so unfortunately we are let's see yeah so David was not able to make it to the panel today like I said earlier he's traveling but really great to see and especially hear him talk about what he's been doing and what he's been doing with other communities for features within WEAP and a very technical view of WEAP he's one of our really advanced technical users and works with us really closely as an associate at the Stockholm environment institute so we're just really glad to work with him regularly and then our final speaker is the training those again are available and open to the public when there will be trainings available on our website which is in the chat but also a reminder that all the attendees today who are registered will also be entered into a raffle for free training and those are the same trainings that are offered on our website so thank you so much and thank you Doug and so now we will hear from Drey Busolo and so we've heard a lot from research and planning applications and now we're going to hear from Drey Busolo senior climate change specialists of the World Bank group from a bit of a perspective from implementation and applications kind of moving towards finding how we can use WEAP to really inform implementation so take it away Joy, thank you. Great, just checking do you see my screen in full? There you go. Okay great yeah so thanks for that introduction and I'll be giving a perspective of some of the work that the World Bank has done together with SEI in one of the countries just like to start by mentioning that there's so much more that SEI has done together with the bank in very many different geographies so today I'll just focus particularly on Rwanda because this is work that I led and so much easier for me to speak on something that I was involved in and at that particular time I was with a water team and now moved on to the climate change side which as you all know water is very much at the centre of climate change so a lot of the work that I did in Rwanda is still very much applicable to my current role so it started back then in around 2020 when the government of Rwanda requested one of our trust fund programmes which was leading at that time to provide an analytical assessment that would support establishment of partnerships looking at how can governments work more closely with private sector and other development partners to identify so where are the risks and what are the opportunities for investments when it comes to water security for Rwanda and also most particularly is what is useful to guide dialogue to bring the different stakeholders, what is of interest to government what is of interest to private sector, what is of interest to the other development partners when it comes to looking at a water-resilient economy for Rwanda so we then had discussions with the government and agreed on hydro-economic and climate change analysis and while we were doing this work WIP was very useful a very useful tool that helps us to help us to do this analytical work it was able to help us show so where which sectors is it irrigation, is it agriculture and the environment side, is it more on the hydropower energy sectors or which geographical areas are likely to experience future water resource challenges that could affect the growth of the economy in Rwanda and what also helped us in this assessment was looking into so what plans does the government have in place what is it looking at doing in the future in terms of growing the sectors and looking around different scenarios to see what does it mean to have a water-resilient economy for Rwanda so we had three scenarios that we looked at at that particular time and the business as usual scenario was looking at what if we stay with the plans that the government has, what does the future when it comes to water supply and demand look like and where are the gaps and where are the risks and if we are to build in the government's plan which is vision and how does that change and to balance these two then we had something in the middle that we call the water-resilient scenario that was looking at the different trade-offs and then use that to make policy and investment recommendations to the government so on top of this we also really looked into different climate scenarios in terms of the temperature and rainfall trends and building this upon the water supply demand gap and really looking at how does climate change then impact the future of the water resources and how it impacts the economy of Rwanda going into the future so we combined all these projections and scenarios and then were able to eventually make recommendations in terms of policies and investments for Rwanda and this then led to these two publications that you're seeing on the screen one that dived very much on the water side and where the whip was very useful was the hydro-economic and climate change analysis but then this was used as a deep dive of providing additional information into the country's climate change and development report so the whip tool really helped us or really facilitated kind of looking into the water supply demand gap and for Rwanda particularly we looked into the sectors that you are seeing on the screen and when Kamiya was speaking and actually the first speaker was really taking us through the whip tool it was good to see how a similar diagram was being shown from the whip tool and so that kind of just relates on how the tool has been used in different places and in this particular space so we looked at different sectors we had data from the government side but as input into the tool to really help us understand so which are the key water use sectors and how does the demand look like going into the future building on to all the different projections that we are looking at key sectors for Rwanda that was really instrumental in this was of course on the domestic side or domestic use of water and then on the agriculture side a little bit a bit on the industry side but most importantly is on the hydro-power as well so Rwanda is very dependent on hydro-power and this was important to look at the river flows and the reservoir releases and how that affects development or the plants that the government has in place and that was one of the key recommendations that was coming out of this analysis is to look at how do we support the government to balance its dependence on hydro-power by using other sources of energy in addition to this was the connection between the WEAP tool and also the macroeconomic analysis and this was important for this analysis because we needed to look at the macroeconomy of Rwanda and look at how does then the water dependent sectors really play into the economic output and some of the water constraints that we were looking at so we had the WEAP tool on one side and we had a model on the other side with different inputs coming on on the economic side and then overlaying this to be able to give us different outputs that are also looking at how does this then affect the GDP how does this then affect the economy going into the future and what are some of the linkages between the different sectors and using that to analyse the upstream and downstream demand of water going into the future so eventually the analysis was able to provide various sets of results that helped us to inform the policy recommendation one and most important was the water demand projections across the three different scenarios so we had the best line scenario business as usual and then we looked into the vision 2050 and you can see how for example irrigation was a big plan for Rwanda by using the WEAP tool and looking at the water use were able to then come up with a little that we call the water resilient scenario that looks at how can we have some trade-offs around the plans for irrigation and balancing with other options also in terms of storage I had one of the speakers speaking about how WEAP tool has been used to really look into storage this was also very important for Rwanda and it was able to help us see so how what are some of the benefits when it comes to increasing storage and how does that then play across when it comes to the GDP the other chart that you're seeing is really how we use the tool to see the special coverage of irrigation demands in Rwanda it's one country that's highly dependent on agriculture and had very big plans when it comes to expanding irrigation in the country and so that was very useful for us to understand where are the plans and how can we plan this going forward so those are some of the outputs that this analysis was able to help us generate and eventually then it led to very useful policy and investment interventions and on top of this was also helping to strengthen the capacity of the government in terms of future planning in terms of future water allocation helping them to better understand how to use the tool and use it even post the analysis on their own what was very interesting is that the initial Rwanda National Water Resources Master Plan had been done using the WIP tool and it was a very specific request from the government to still use the same tool to update the next water resources master plan and so this helped us to use that opportunity to build the capacity to use the tool going into the future. So there are very many different policy recommendations that we made out of this analysis but for me I think what was most important is that we left at a point where the government had the capacity to continue using the tool on their own if I recall well I think some of the SEI colleagues and Ed and Brian were thinking of having a specific training course for the government team that they can be more comfortable using the tool on their own and on top of that was just being able to use this analysis to really communicate in a simple way for even the private sector interested actors and other organizations to understand how water was important for the economy in Rwanda and how also climate change is a big risk for Rwanda but eventually in a very easy succinct using the different outputs to communicate very high level policy recommendations for a country that really needed this kind of analysis so credit to SEI team I really enjoyed my time working with them on this on this particular work Annette, Brian, Eric and Hanson and I'll just pause here and if there are any questions I'll take them from through the chat box. Thank you. Thank you so much Joy and it really is so exciting to see how we can take WEAP and then incorporate it into other economic models and really really understand and make decisions and investment decisions based on these at the country level I know that the World Bank has also done it at the sub-regional level and also the multi-country level so we really love to see how WEAP can be used to be making decisions for water resources because in the end we really want it to be applied and used and then also on the other end we have researchers who are coming up with new ways to use the tools and new processes to represent so it's just really great to see the broad uses that we have with the tools. Thank you, Joy. So now we are going to enter into the answer session of our event. We are running up on time here. It really is great to see all the knowledge that is shared from our panelists and also I just wanted to do just one mouse reminder that we will be taking the attendee list to do our raffle after the end of the event and we'll be contacting our winner for free WEAP training. That's a $300 value these days so we're excited to share that and we will share that after the event later today so thank you all for those who have attended. I'm going to take a look at the question answer. I also see that quite a few questions are more technical questions about the tool and we will definitely point to our training materials which are in the chat and also if there's a specific technical question I think there are specific training materials or chapters that we can point to so yeah for those of you who have left your emails there we'll make sure to take a look at those but we are specifically looking for kind of more general questions to our panelists because there are experts here also Lindsay put in the chat our video tutorials on YouTube in English there's also many YouTube videos that are from other researchers and users who may have had similar issues or problems to your years as well. I did want to open it up Kami or Melina and Joy as you were seeing your presentations I know a few of you kind of mentioned in there or if there was something else that you wanted to add after seeing kind of all these presentations so I don't know if any of you had kind of some either closing thoughts or responses to everything that you've seen today. Okay let's start with Melina Thank you, it's for Joy because in our work with Bolivia Watch World Bank is interested to use with the water balance to inform the agriculture projects then maybe we can keep in touch no more about your experience in Rwanda maybe in other countries and if it is possible to facilitate this dialogue between the specialists and officers from the World Bank to maybe share the lesson, the learned lessons or your suggestions or thoughts about WIP to inform agriculture projects Yes, sure I've just sent to you my email address in the chat box privately so yes I'm happy to connect with you and connect with colleagues within the bank and talk about how we used WIP in Rwanda and how it can be of help in Bolivia I got to know about WIP in the same way so I had a colleague who had used WIP before in another geography and he recommended it and yes so happy to do the same Joy, I think you also were going to either ask a question or comment Mine was a comment and I think it's really been great just seeing how WIP has been used in other places a lot of the California examples are really good and Bolivia as well I think it's really transformational and there are plenty of examples there so I'll be looking for the PowerPoint presentations that I can share internally with colleagues on this side so that we can get to for people to know more about how WIP has been used in many, many other different places but it's been a great session Yeah, so again it's really been great participating in this event and hearing about all the work that's being done around the world with WIP the California water plan is the state of California strategic plan for water development and water management and sustainability so really the fact that we have used WIP and it brought a lot of support and understanding of the use of the model in the last 20 years is a big accomplishment because 20 years ago there was a lot of concern even in the California legislature that the water plan was developed kind of in a black box it wasn't transparent in the data it used but it was prepared and I think we have really accomplished a lot in that regard and the WIP model when it comes to looking at future scenarios and conditions has been a big part of that and it's really helped us in forging a dialogue between the technical community and the policy community the water management community and that's a very important feature of WIP because it's understandable accessible and can be used in almost real time scenario building events I'll just note that we're not stopping we're already working on update 2028 future scenarios Paul Shipman and Abdul Khan are leading that effort we're going to continue to do advancement on decision scaling vulnerability assessment and we're going to do evaluation of adaptation strategies based on that vulnerability we also are looking to help improve the wheat groundwater routines as it applies to California and we want to add a few more hydrologic regions to our more detailed central valley model so a lot of good things still to come thank you thank you so much come here and I think just you know like I said we're running up on time here and it was so great to hear from everyone and all the details about different applications from our for our general users who sent in their testimonials we're so happy to hear from you and thank you very much I think also as one of our attendees and the SEI US Water Program Director noted that we'd love to hear suggestions on what people would like to see and weep going forward so if anyone wants to put that in the chat and we can take that into consideration we're a team here we're a small team but we are always trying to do a good job of making sure that we're able to use our needs and user interests and then I just want to plug one more time all of our training materials that Lindsay and Doug have been putting into the chat and that are available on our website and so thank you all and I think that's how we'll close the event as we're just a couple minutes over and thank you very much to our panelists and thank you very much to Jack who really does carry all of us here and the Weep Tool at SEI so thank you all and congratulations Weep for 50,000 users and 35 years and let's let it get to 100,000 or more and another 35 years of use so thank you all have a very nice day