Building reservoir release schedules to manage engineered river systems can involve costly trade‐offs between storing and releasing water. As a result, the design of release schedules requires metrics that quantify the benefit and damages created by releases to the downstream ecosystem. Such metrics should support making operational decisions under uncertain hydrologic conditions, including drought and flood seasons. This study addresses this need and develops a reservoir operation rule structure and method to maximize downstream environmental benefit while meeting human water demands. The result is a general approach for hedging downstream environmental objectives. A multistage stochastic mixed‐integer nonlinear program with Markov Chains, identifies optimal “environmental hedging,” releases to maximize environmental benefits subject to probabilistic seasonal hydrologic conditions, current, past, and future environmental demand, human water supply needs, infrastructure limitations, population dynamics, drought storage protection, and the river's carrying capacity. Environmental hedging “hedges bets” for drought by reducing releases for fish, sometimes intentionally killing some fish early to reduce the likelihood of large fish kills and storage crises later. This approach is applied to Folsom reservoir in California to support survival of fall‐run Chinook salmon in the lower American River for a range of carryover and initial storage cases. Benefit is measured in terms of fish survival; maintaining self‐sustaining native fish populations is a significant indicator of ecosystem function. Environmental hedging meets human demand and outperforms other operating rules, including the current Folsom operating strategy, based on metrics of fish extirpation and water supply reliability.
Water users in California's hybrid water rights system have different priorities to available surface water in times of water scarcity. A set of two linear programming models was developed to determine curtailments of water uses under drought conditions according to riparian and appropriative water right doctrines with spatially varying water availability and water rights within a basin. The models were implemented in spreadsheets and extended to estimate water right reliability and factors of safety in water right administration. Alternate methods for calculating water use curtailments are discussed. Curtailments from the models are compared to actual water shortage notices issued by the state for the Eel River, California for June 30, 2014. Analyzing water use curtailments with an algorithm in spreadsheet software offers a mechanistic, transparent, accessible, and precise approach derived from legal doctrines to support water rights administration during drought.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.