Relative Importance of Variables in Water Resources Planning

Four variables involved in the water resources planning decision characterized by hydrology, modeling of dissolved oxygen behavior in an estuary, projection of economic development, and water quality objective, were tested for sensitivity in the evaluation of a water resources system's performance. The results were obtained assuming a 25% range in economic projection, 1 mg/1 range in the dissolved oxygen objective, two separately developed models of estuarial dissolved oxygen behavior, and 50- and 10-year sequences of hydrologic data. The results of simulations of system operation with the different values of the planning variables were subjected to a four-way analysis of variance to partition the variance attributable to each planning variable. For the system under consideration, the relative importance of the variables in descending order is: (1) economic development projection, (2) water quality objective, (3) dissolved oxygen modeling, and (4) hydrology.