Water infrastructures, such as dams, reservoirs and coastal defense structure, play a critical role in establishing and sustaining economic and societal activities, including water storage and supply, flood protection, and energy production. There are a large number of man-made reservoirs all over the world, and China alone has over 98,000 of them. It has been long observed that the existence of these reservoirs has greatly changed the natural runoff processes, sediment transport processes, regional hydrology, ecology and habitat, etc. As the operations of these large reservoirs become more complex due to the multiple functions we expect/ demand from these reservoirs, the impacts of these reservoirs on the natural environment is often compounded and confounded.
In addition, a number of the large reservoirs are interlinked and often complimented with water transfer schemes in order to create resilience and alleviate water security crisis. The impacts of large water bodies on hydrology and ecology is not new, but often confined to unregulated natural lakes and wetlands. On the other hand, there is a lack of systematic study with regards to regulated man-made reservoirs.
We invite contributions from across the atmospheric, meteorological and hydrological communities. In particular, we welcome papers that address advances in:
(i) understanding and predicting the propagation of inflow errors on cascade reservoirs operation accuracy and efficiency;
(ii) understanding and modelling different modes of reservoir operations for water supply, flood protection, energy production under climate variability and changes;
(iii) use of multiple scale and types of earth observation and data assimilation techniques for large reservoir operations;
(iv) impact of climate change on large reservoir and the compounded effects on the catchment hydrology and ecology;
(v) understanding and quantification of optimality in multi-purpose large man-made reservoirs;
(vi) Mathematical and Statistical modeling for the prediction and assessments of water infrastructure risks.