Development of a Demand Driven Hydro-climatic Model for Drought Planning

Abstract

In recent years, droughts with increasing severity and frequency have been experienced around the world due to climate change effects. Water planning and management during droughts needs to deal with water demand variability, uncertainties in streamflow prediction, conflicts over water resources allocation, and the absence of necessary emergency schemes in drought situations. Reservoirs could play an important role in drought mitigation; therefore, development of an algorithm for operation of reservoirs in drought periods could help to mitigate the drought impacts by reducing the expected water shortages. For this purpose, the probable drought's characteristics and their variations in response to factors such as climate change should be incorporated. This study aims at developing a contingency planning scheme for operation of reservoirs in drought periods using hedging rules with the objective of decreasing the maximum water deficit. The case study for evaluation of the performance of the proposed algorithm is the Sattarkhan reservoir in the Aharchay watershed, located in the northwestern part of Iran. The trend evaluations of the hydro-climatic variables show that the climate change has already affected streamflow in the region and has increased water scarcity and drought severity. To incorporate the climate change study in reservoir planning; streamflow should be simulated under climate change impacts. For this purpose, the climatic variables including temperature and precipitation in the future under climate change impacts are simulated using downscaled GCM (General Circulation Model) outputs to derive scenarios for possible future drought events. Then a hydrological model is developed to simulate the river streamflow, based on the downscaled data. The results show that the proposed Water Resour Manage (2012) 26:329-357 methodology leads to less water deficit and decreases the drought damages in the study area.

Optimization of Hedging Rules for Hydropower Reservoir Operation

“…They found that preserving water before drought should be judged carefully, especially in the regions where the evaporation rate was high. Karamouz et al [20] applied hedging based optimization model to a reservoir, which served domestic, industrial, and irrigation demands. They obtained hedging rules based on precipitation, temperature, and generated stream ow.…”

A framework for the assessment of reservoir operation adaptation to climate change in an arid region

“…The research shows that the reservoir is adaptable to climate changes (Yao and Georgakakos, 2001). In other researches, Maurer et al (2009) and Karamouz et al (2012) investigated effects of climate change on reliability of reservoirs using outputs of the emission scenarios A2 and B2 of GCM model. Their research indicates reduction of capacity of hydropower and water supply under climate change (Karamouz et al, 2012;Maurer et al, 2009).…”

Simulation of Multipurpose Reservoir Operation with Hedging Rules

“…Different forms of hedging rules used for domestic and irrigation supply for the past few decades and Neelakantan and Sasireka [15] review paper and Sasireka and Neelakantan [16,17]shows different forms of hedging rules proposed for domestic, irrigation and hydropower generation purpose. Karamouz et al [18] developed a contingency planning scheme by incorporating hedging rule in the operation of reservoirs in drought periods to reduce the effect of water deficit. Almost all the reported works which used hedging rule for reservoir operation considered either drinking water demand or irrigation demand or both together.…”