Inferred inflow forecast horizons guiding reservoir  release decisions across the United States

Turner, Sean W. D.; Xu, Wenwei; Voisin, Nathalie

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-1275-2020

Articles | Volume 24, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-1275-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-1275-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 24, issue 3

Research article

|

19 Mar 2020

Research article |

| 19 Mar 2020

Inferred inflow forecast horizons guiding reservoir release decisions across the United States

Sean W. D. Turner, Wenwei Xu, and Nathalie Voisin

Data sets

Reclamation Hydromet US Bureau of Reclamation https://www.usbr.gov/pn/hydromet/arcread.html

USBR Water API v1 US Bureau of Reclamation https://water.usbr.gov/api/web/app.php/api/

Creating Data as a Service for U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Reservoirs L. A., Patterson, M. W. Doyle, and S. Kuzma http://nicholasinstitute.duke.edu/

Reservoirs California Data Exchange Center, California Department of Water Resources https://info.water.ca.gov/reservoir.html

Water Data For Texas – Texas Reservoirs Texas Water Development Board https://waterdatafortexas.org/reservoirs/statewide/

USGS Water Data for the Nation US Geological Survey https://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis

Short summary

To understand human vulnerability to flood and drought risk across large regions, researchers increasingly use large-scale hydrological models that convert climate to river flows. These models include the important effects of river regulation by dams but do not currently capture dam operators' use of flow forecasts to mitigate risk. This research addresses this problem by developing an approach to infer the forecast horizons contributing to the operations of a large sample of dams.