Phoenix, an Active Management Area in the desert Southwest US, is the 5 th most populated city in the US. Scarce local groundwater and water transported from external resources must be managed in the presence of different types of energy sources. Local and regional decision-makers are faced with answering challenging questions on managing water, energy supply, and demand over a few years to several decades. Prediction and planning for the interdependency of these entities can benefit from modeling the water and energy systems as well as their interactions with one another. In this paper, the integrated WEAP and LEAP tools and a modeling framework that externalizes their hidden linkage to an interaction model are described and compared using the Phoenix AMA. Loose coupling enabled by interaction modeling is a key for decision-policies that should be grounded at the nexus of the water-energy system of systems.