Reservoir Operating Rule Optimization for California’s Sacramento Valley

Abstract

Reservoir operating rules for water resource systems are typically developed by combining intuition, professional discussion, and simulation modeling. This paper describes a joint optimization-simulation approach to develop preliminary economically-based operating rules for major reservoirs in California's Sacramento Valley, based on optimized results from CALVIN, a hydro-economic optimization model. We infer strategic operating rules from the optimization model results, including storage allocation rules to balance storage among multiple reservoirs, and reservoir release rules to determine monthly release for individual reservoirs. Results show the potential utility of considering previous year type on water availability and various system and subsystem storage conditions, in addition to normal consideration of local reservoir storage, season, and current inflows. We create a simple simulation to further refine and test the derived operating rules. Optimization model results show particular insights for balancing the allocation of water storage among Shasta, Trinity, and Oroville reservoirs over drawdown and refill seasons, as well as some insights for release rules at major reservoirs in the Sacramento Valley. We also discuss the applicability and limitations of developing reservoir operation rules from optimization model results.

Growth of the Decision Tree: Advances in Bottom‐Up Climate Change Risk Management

“…Correspondingly, there has been great interest in coupling process-based hydrologic models to human water-resource systems models to better represent the reciprocal interactions and coevolution of the natural and human water systems. Coupled human-hydrologic models have proven useful to address a variety of water management challenges related to infrastructure operation, demand management, river restoration, climate change, and the regional water-energy-food nexus (Tomsic et al 2007;Null et al 2014;Nelson et al 2016;Yang et al 2016;Wada et al 2017;Yang and Wi 2018). They have also been shown to be effective at facilitating stakeholder-driven modeling processes that help improve conceptualization of the water system, especially in transboundary river basins (Khan et al 2017).…”