WEAP, Climate and Decision Making
Training-Workshop Agenda
May 19 to 22, 2015
Introduction
The following is the training agenda for the Thailand WEAP, Climate Change and Decision Making activities, with a focus on the training, use, and application of the Water Evaluation and Planning System (WEAP) software for climate change impact assessment and response. The proposed training will take place from 19 to 22 May, 2015 in Bangkok. Within this document is a draft agenda for the training set to span 4 days. The agenda includes theoretical and practical sessions. The theoretical sessions include introduction to the WEAP system components and their functionality and an overview of climate change background, manifestations in weather, and approaches to predictions and projections. The practical sessions include hands on training on the model used in the tutorial exercises and an independent model setup and running.
Agenda Details
In the current draft of the agenda, there is time set aside for trainees to build their own WEAP model for select River Basins in Thailand, in particular the Phechaburi and Prachuap watersheds. Previous experience has shown that trainees learn the concepts and understand the software better if they are given the opportunity to think through the development of a model using data with which they are familiar.
Another question about the agenda is related to the more advanced topics. TBD
Session Descriptions
1. Opening and introduction - During this session the training will be introduced. Often this includes a brief introduction by the host institution, introduction of the participants, and introduction of the trainers. Following that, provision of a general overview of water resources modeling and the WEAP software and the Robust Decision Making approach.
2. WEAP in one hour - this first hands-on session will introduce the trainees to the WEAP graphical user interface and to the basic skills required in working with the software. This tutorial has a simple problem in which the balancing of demand and supply is introduced. Basic tools in WEAP - this hands-on session introduces the user to the basic functionality in WEAP that allows for specification of parameters, equations, and operations rules. This functionality will be used in later sessions to build more sophisticated representations of supply and demand.
3. Introduction to Climate Change science, discussion of possible impacts at global, regional and local scales, and introduction with examples projection and prediction concepts.
4. Scenario analysis in WEAP - this hands-on session introduces the concept of scenarios in WEAP. This functionality is a very powerful tool which allows users to easily study "what if" questions using the software.
5. Building a WEAP application of the “ “ River Basin - Days 1-4. In these sessions, we will introduce the “River Basin” and the data that are available for use in a model. Assuming that data can be prepared, we can lead the trainees through the steps necessary to build a simple, functioning WEAP model of the basin.
