Water reservoir systems may become more adaptive and reliable to external changes by enlarging the information sets used in their operations. Models and forecasts of future hydro-climatic and socio-economic conditions are traditionally used for this purpose. Nevertheless, the identification of skillful forecasts and models might be highly critical when the system comprises several processes with inconsistent dynamics (fast and slow) and disparate levels of predictability. In these contexts, the direct use of observational data, describing the current conditions of the water system, may represent a practicable and zero-cost alternative. This paper contrasts the relative contribution of state observations and perfect forecasts of future water availability in improving multipurpose water reservoirs operation over short- and long-term temporal scales. The approach is demonstrated on the snow-dominated Lake Como system, operated for flood control and water supply. The Information Selection Assessment (ISA) framework is adopted to retrieve the most relevant information to be used for conditioning the operations. By explicitly distinguishing between observational dataset and future forecasts, we quantify the relative contribution of current water system state estimates and perfect streamflow forecasts in improving the lake regulation with respect to both flood control and water supply. Results show that using the available observational data capturing slow dynamic processes, particularly the snow melting process, produces a 10% improvement in the system performance. This latter represents the lower bound of the potential improvement, which may increase to the upper limit of 40% in case skillful (perfect) long-term streamflow forecasts are used

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Water resource management (WRM) through dams or reservoirs is worldwide necessary to support key human-related activities, ranging from hydropower production to water allocation and flood risk mitigation. Designing of reservoir operations aims primarily to fulfill the main purpose (or purposes) for which the structure has been built. However, it is well known that reservoirs strongly influence river geomorphic processes, causing sediment deficits downstream, altering water, and sediment fluxes, leading to riverbed incision and causing infrastructure instability and ecological degradation. We propose a framework that, by combining physically based modeling, surrogate modeling techniques, and multiobjective (MO) optimization, allows to include fluvial geomorphology into MO optimization whose main objectives are the maximization of hydropower revenue and the minimization of riverbed degradation. The case study is a run-of-the-river power plant on the River Po (Italy). A 1-D mobile-bed hydro-morphological model simulated the riverbed evolution over a 10 year horizon for alternatives operation rules of the power plant. The knowledge provided by such a physically based model is integrated into a MO optimization routine via surrogate modeling using the response surface methodology. Hence, this framework overcomes the high computational costs that so far hindered the integration of river geomorphology into WRM. We provided numerical proof that river morphologic processes and hydropower production are indeed in conflict but that the conflict may be mitigated with appropriate control strategies.

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