EGU21-13146
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-13146
EGU General Assembly 2021
© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Data-driven reservoir storage and release scheme parameterized for all large dams of the United States

Sean Turner1, Nathalie Voisin2, Jennie Steyaert3, and Laura Condon3
Sean Turner et al.
  • 1PNNL, Washington, United States of America (sean.turner@pnnl.gov)
  • 2PNNL, Seattle, Washington, United States of America
  • 3University of Arizona, United States of America

Large-scale hydrological and water management models (LHMs) require reservoir operations schemes to simulate the influence of human systems on natural earth systems. A typical challenge for representing hundreds of reservoirs in a single LHM is creating consistent scheme capable of simulating realistic water storage and release amidst the diversity in the type of operations. We present a new dataset of observed reservoir operations that includes daily storage, inflow, outflow, evaporation, and elevation level time series for approximately 600 large reservoirs (> 0.1kmstorage) located throughout the conterminous United States. These data have been collected through a combination of mining water agencies databases and formal Freedom of Information (FOI) requests. The newly compiled data are used to derive data-driven simulation schemes, which we compare against contemporary, generic approaches adopted in state-of-the-art LHMs. With release-centric reservoir operations scheme usually more sensitive to biases in hydrologic simulations, we introduce a parsimonious scheme that defines storage targets using harmonic functions that can also be easily extrapolated to un-measured dams. This extrapolation allows us to develop realistic reservoir operations for all 1945 large reservoirs in the conterminous United States currently represented in the Global Reservoir and Dams database.

How to cite: Turner, S., Voisin, N., Steyaert, J., and Condon, L.: Data-driven reservoir storage and release scheme parameterized for all large dams of the United States, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-13146, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-13146, 2021.

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