General

While the study of river hydrodynamics was first proposed in 2004, it wasn’t funded until 2011. So the scientists working on the 2012 edition of the master plan put together preliminary planning models that prepared the way for the more-detailed operating models to be developed when the latest data on the lower river became available. That work was cheered in peer reviews, even though it was based on river data that, in some cases, were decades old, researchers said.[…]

The goal of the research, he said, was to see if the conventional scientific wisdom about how much sediment the river carries in its upstream reaches holds true on its last leg to the Gulf.[…]

Understanding the overall demands on the river is critical to the master plan because the river must also serve other important needs.[…]