A Nationwide Analysis of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Reservoir Performance in Meeting Operational Targets

Patterson, Lauren A.; Doyle, Martin W.

doi:10.1111/1752-1688.12622

Cited by 17 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Geographic variations in reallocation (and its documentation) raise questions about consistency in the interpretation and implementation of different policies or procedures, particularly when language within broader policies is vague. Our results presented here and elsewhere (Patterson and Doyle ) are not positive or negative reflections of the Corps; rather, the geographic differences we document are an emergent feature common with federal decentralization when applied to environmental management (Fontana ). The more important long‐term question for the Corps is whether differences in policy interpretation and documentation is desirable; or rather, at what point (in terms of scale or frequency) do differences in policy interpretation become undesirable?…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 54%

“…This includes the use of drought contingency plans (i.e., triggered adjustments to reservoir operations when reservoir levels drop below a predefined elevation) and temporary deviations to respond to immediate conditions for a relatively short period of time (e.g., reservoir repairs, downstream boating accidents, or reducing downstream flood damages). However, we found several instances of ongoing “temporary” reservoir operational departures which have, in fact, occurred every year or have lasted decades (Patterson and Doyle ). That is, reservoir operations may be allowed to drift, or depart from WCPs over time without a formally articulated plan for doing so.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Given that reservoir management is implemented locally, it is perhaps not surprising that there are strong geographic differences in behavior between Districts and Divisions, and this extends beyond reallocation decisions. For instance, Patterson and Doyle () demonstrated differences in reservoirs meeting their WCPs, while Owen () and Doyle et al. () demonstrated differences in how Corps Districts and Divisions implemented their regulatory authority of the Clean Water Act.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The data for reallocations not tied to water supply (such as flood control, hydropower, and environmental flows) were ad hoc and inconsistent. These reallocations were discovered via reports, web searches, and as part of an earlier project where sudden differences between operational targets and reservoir levels were observed and explored (Patterson and Doyle ). A total of 26 reallocations unrelated to water supply were identified, although many of these reallocations did not specify a storage volume, which limited our ability for further analysis.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Specifically, we assessed the frequency, type, and size of reallocations. Reservoir data compiled in Patterson and Doyle () were merged with the reallocation data to provide information on storage volumes at the time of a reallocation in order to understand the relative impact of the reallocation on the gross storage (sum of the sediment, conservation, and flood control pools), origin pool, and destination pool (e.g., reallocation volume divided by gross storage volume). We also analyzed reallocations with respect to the 1958 Water Supply Act and the Corps’ Planning Guidance Notebook (USACE ), which provides guidance on the level of oversight necessary for authorizing water supply agreements when a reallocation is needed (Table ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Federal Decentralization and Adaptive Management of Water Resources: Reservoir Reallocation by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

Doyle

Patterson

2019

J American Water Resour Assoc

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Reservoir operations must respond to changing conditions, such as climate, water demand, regulations, and sedimentation. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) can reallocate reservoir storage to respond to such changes. We assembled and analyzed a database of reservoir reallocations implemented and proposed by the Corps. While only a small portion of total reservoir storage nationwide has been reallocated, there are substantial differences in reallocation frequency and magnitude across the nation: some Corps Districts and Divisions use reallocation while others do not, relying more on discretion and small‐scale adaptation of operations. This difference illustrates how water resource agencies like the Corps decentralize management decisions to allow responding to disparate conditions. Decentralized decision‐making provides a responsive approach to water management, while centralized and hierarchical decision‐making is a slower, more deliberative approach. Decentralized decision‐making may lead to the accumulation of short‐term, local decisions over time to the point that the system is managed differently than anticipated. Reallocation, which is a form of planned adaptive management, can be accommodating of multiple competing demands and different stakeholders, yet expensive and less temporally responsive. The challenge for any large water resource management agency is to balance between local‐level, responsive discretion vs. centralized, planned decision‐making.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 54%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Federal Decentralization and Adaptive Management of Water Resources: Reservoir Reallocation by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

Doyle

Patterson

2019

J American Water Resour Assoc

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Hierarchical Temporal Scale Data-driven Reservoir Operation Modeling

Longyang

Zeng

2022

Preprint

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As an important anthropogenic interference on the water cycle, reservoir operation behavior remains challenging to be properly represented in hydrologic models, thus limiting the capability of predicting streamflow under the interactions between hydrologic variability and operational preferences. Data-driven models provide a promising approach to represent reservoir operation rules by capturing relationships embedded in historical records. Similar to hydrologic processes vary across temporal scales, reservoir operations manifest themselves at different timescales, prioritizing different targets to mitigate streamflow variability at a given time scale. To capture interactions of reservoir operations across time scales, we proposed a hierarchical temporal scale framework to investigate the behaviors of over 300 major reservoirs across the Contiguous United States with a wide range of streamflow conditions. Machine learning models were constructed to simulate reservoir operation at daily, weekly, and monthly scales, where decisions at short-term scales interact with long-term decisions. We found that the hierarchical temporal scale configuration better captures reservoir releases than models constructed at a single time scale, especially for reservoirs with multiple operation targets. Model-based sensitivity analysis shows that for more than one third of the studied reservoirs, the release schemes, as a function of decision variables, vary at different time scales, suggesting that operators are commonly faced with complicated trade-offs to serve multiple purposes. The proposed hierarchical temporal scale approach is flexible to incorporate various data-driven models and decision variables to derive reservoir operation rule, providing a robust framework to understand the feedbacks between natural streamflow variability and human interferences across time scales.

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River management response to multi‐decade changes in timing of reservoir inflows, Columbia River Basin, USA

Jones

Hammond

2020

Hydrological Processes

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Around the world, long-term changes in the timing and magnitude of streamflow are testing the ability of large managed water resource systems constructed in the 20th century to continue to meet objectives in the 21st century. Streamflow records for unregulated rivers upstream of reservoirs can be combined with records downstream of reservoirs using a paired-watershed framework and concepts of water resource system performance to assess how reservoir management has responded to long-term change. Using publicly available data, this study quantified how the intra-annual timing of inflows and outflows of 25 major reservoirs has shifted, how management has responded, and how this has influenced reliability and vulnerability of the water resource system in the 668,000 km 2 Columbia River basin from 1950 to 2012. Reservoir inflows increased slightly in early spring and declined in late spring to early fall, but reservoir outflows increased in late summer from 1950 to 2012. Average inflows to reservoirs in the low flow period exceeded outflows in the1950s, but inflows are now less than outflows. Reservoirs have increased hedging, that is, they have stored more water during the spring, in order to meet the widening gap between inflows and outflows during the summer low flow period. For a given level of reliability (the fraction of time flow targets were met), vulnerability (the maximum departure from the flow target) was greater during periods with lower than average inflows. Thus, the water management system in this large river basin has adjusted to multi-decade trends of declining inflows, but vulnerability, that is, the potential for excess releases in spring and shortfalls in summer, has increased. This study demonstrates the value of combining publicly available historical data on streamflow with concepts from paired-watershed analyses and metrics of water resource performance to detect, evaluate, and manage water resource systems in large river basins. K E Y W O R D S climate and vegetation change, hedging, historical streamflow records, large river basin water management, non-stationarity, reference watersheds, reservoir management 1 | INTRODUCTION Management of water resources on the time scale of many decades across large bioclimatically variable river basins is challenging, as management objectives and the environment evolve. Gradual environmental change, such as climate change and land cover change, test the reliability of engineered water resource systems and their vulnerability to failure (Schewe et al., 2014; Srinivasan, Lambin, Gorelick, Thompson, & Rozelle, 2012). Dried lakes in central Asia, the result of decades of unsustainable water resource management, are powerful symbols of

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A Nationwide Analysis of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Reservoir Performance in Meeting Operational Targets

Cited by 17 publications

References 19 publications

Federal Decentralization and Adaptive Management of Water Resources: Reservoir Reallocation by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

Federal Decentralization and Adaptive Management of Water Resources: Reservoir Reallocation by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

Hierarchical Temporal Scale Data-driven Reservoir Operation Modeling

River management response to multi‐decade changes in timing of reservoir inflows, Columbia River Basin, USA

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