Abstract
During the past several decades, numerous reservoirs have been built across the world for a variety of purposes such as flood control, irrigation, municipal/industrial water supplies, and hydropower generation. Consequently, the timing and magnitude of natural streamflow have been altered significantly by reservoir operations. In addition, the hydrological cycle is also modified by land-use/land-cover change and by climate change. To understand the fine-scale feedback between hydrological processes and water management decisions, a distributed hydrological model embedded with a reservoir component is desired. In this study, a multi-purpose reservoir module with predefined complex operational rules was integrated into the Distributed Hydrology Soil Vegetation Model (DHSVM). Conditional operating rules, which are designed to reduce flood risk and enhance water supply reliability, were adopted in this module. The performance of the integrated model was tested over the upper Brazos River Basin in Texas, where two U.S. Army Corps of Engineers managed reservoirs, Lake Whitney and Aquilla Lake, are located. The integrated model was calibrated and validated using observed reservoir inflow, outflow, and storage data. The error statistics were summarized for both reservoirs on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Using the weekly reservoir storage for Lake Whitney as an example, the coefficient of determination (R2) was 0.85 and the Nash-Sutcliff Efficiency (NSE) was 0.75. These results suggest that this reservoir module holds promise for use in sub-monthly hydrological simulations. With the new reservoir component, the DHSVM provides a platform to support adaptive water resources management under the impacts of evolving anthropogenic activities and substantial environmental changes.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 16-31 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Journal | Advances in Water Resources |
| Volume | 98 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Dec 1 2016 |
Funding
This research was supported by U.S. National Science Foundation grant CBET-1454297 . Gang Zhao was also partially supported by the W. G. Mills Scholarship ( 02-650509 ) and the USGS Graduate Student Research Program ( G16AP00085 ) provided by the Texas Water Research Institute . We want to express our great appreciation to Michael F. Schwind (working for USACE) for sharing information about the reservoirs. This research has also benefitted from the use of the Texas A&M Supercomputing Facility ( http://sc.tamu.edu ) and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility ( https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/ ). This paper was coauthored by employees of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, managed by UT Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725, and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, managed by Battelle under contract DE-AC05-76RL01830 (both contracts are with the U.S. Department of Energy). Accordingly, the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States government purposes.
Keywords
- DHSVM
- Operation rules
- Reservoir
- Water resources