Risk assessment in water resources planning under  climate change at the Júcar River basin

Suárez-Almiñana, Sara; Solera, Abel; Madrigal, Jaime; Andreu, Joaquín; Paredes-Arquiola, Javier

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-5297-2020

Articles | Volume 24, issue 11

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-5297-2020

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

Special issue:

Hydrological cycle in the Mediterranean (ACP/AMT/GMD/HESS/NHESS/OS...

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-5297-2020

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

Articles | Volume 24, issue 11

Research article

|

14 Nov 2020

Research article |

| 14 Nov 2020

Risk assessment in water resources planning under climate change at the Júcar River basin

Sara Suárez-Almiñana, Abel Solera, Jaime Madrigal, Joaquín Andreu, and Javier Paredes-Arquiola

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Final revised paper (published on 14 Nov 2020)
Preprint (discussion started on 07 Oct 2019)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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RC1: 'Comments to “Methodology based on modelling processes and the characterisation of natural flows for risk assessment and water management under the influence of climate change”', Anonymous Referee #1, 22 Nov 2019
- AC1: 'Response to RC1', Sara Suárez-Almiñana, 20 Jan 2020
RC2: 'Referee comments', Anonymous Referee #2, 25 Nov 2019
- AC2: 'Response to RC2', Sara Suárez-Almiñana, 21 Jan 2020

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Publish subject to revisions (further review by editor and referees) (26 Mar 2020) by Giuseppe Tito Aronica

AR by Sara Suárez-Almiñana on behalf of the Authors (06 May 2020) Manuscript

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (further review by editor and referees) (10 Jun 2020) by Giuseppe Tito Aronica

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (24 Jul 2020) by Giuseppe Tito Aronica

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (25 Aug 2020)

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (03 Sep 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Manuscript: Number: HESS-2019-496

Title: Risk assessment in water resources planning under climate change at
the Júcar River
Authors: Sara Suárez-Almiñana, Abel Solera, Jaime Madrigal, Joaquín Andreu, Javier Paredes-Arquiola

Contents overview:
The paper aims to integrate climate change projections into water system management models in order to guide the decision-making taking into account drought risk assessments.
Main results should be in estimating drought risk indicators and management rules in the future for the water resources system (WRS).
A general remark regards the methodological approach of this complex study regarding climate-changes, hydrology, and water system management: paper needs to improve the clarity of exposition in terms of sections arrangement and description of methods. Considering the complexity and the amount of the reported material, I suggest giving at the end of the Introduction an outlook of the following paper content.

Specific Remarks:
1) The Introduction focus on the need of methodologies to integrate climate projections in the decision process for water management and drought risk assessments in order to evaluate the future impacts on inflows reduction on stored water availability. This aim is stated in (lines 49-51): “That is exactly what we aim to do in this study: proposing a general methodology inspired on the work of Suárez-Almiñana et al. (2017) to integrate climate projections in the decision process throughout a model chain for water management and drought risk assessments, where the future impacts on inflows and water resources are evaluated.” Consequently, the paper deals with different modelling approaches (climate projection, storages inflow evaluation, WRS simulation) with a lot of evaluated material, since many years this work group has implemented modules of the Aquatool DSS. As previously stated, a general outlook of paper structure should be given at the end of the introduction. Nevertheless, Introduction is very extended and could be reduced of some information irrelevant (or no strictly requested) for the rest of the manuscript.

2) Even if the Jucar River Basin is an extensively studied catchment in literature, especially from this research group, I suggest giving some more information regarding the criticality in water system management. At the moment in the paragraph 2 only some data on water stress in the WRS are given. Moreover, as in the Management Plan and in the Drought Management Plan for this basin, the climate projections were not incorporated explicitly (lines 132-135) and in previous studies climate change effects were only assessed by reducing the natural inflows in a certain percentage, it should be interesting to compare previous management rules given in these Plans with the ones obtained using the hereafter proposed procedures

3) Differences between the two alternatives for characterisation of hydrological models, called option A and option B, are not clearly recognized. The main difference between these alternatives seems to be the application of the bias correction before (option A) or after (option B), nevertheless, future inflows from A and B options are both introduced in the management model to simulate the future water availability (lines 174-75). Consequently, the two series can be considered as different possible runoff scenarios equally probable ? In any case main statistics of historical and adopted runoff series should be documented in the paper not only graphically and compared with previous values used in Plans.

4) Paragraph 4.3, showing future water storage ensemble results (shaded area) occupies practically the whole field of stored volume in the basin. These results, indicating for authors a huge uncertainty for the future, highlight the opportunity of filtering obtained data in order to provide performances information managing the system. Graduating colours by frequencies could be useful.

5) In 4.4, giving drought risk indicators, the frequency evolution of reservoirs storage in the system can be seen in Fig. 8 for both options A and B and the exceedance probabilities in storage volumes of March and September (Fig. 9). In addition, values of mean allocated resources for demands and consequent deficit values, as well the well known indices of reliability, vulnerability, resiliency derived from the adoption of the Aquatool DSS could be documented.
6) The final phrase in Discussion, pointing out that all the simulations were made taking into account the current conditions of the system should be anticipated in the modelling description paragraph.

Referee Report: PDF

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (23 Sep 2020) by Giuseppe Tito Aronica

AR by Sara Suárez-Almiñana on behalf of the Authors (01 Oct 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (06 Oct 2020) by Giuseppe Tito Aronica

AR by Sara Suárez-Almiñana on behalf of the Authors (07 Oct 2020)

Short summary

This work responds to the need for an effective methodology that integrates climate change projections into water planning and management to guide complex basin decision-making. This general approach is based on a model chain for management and drought risk assessments and applied to the Júcar River basin (Spain), showing a worrying deterioration of the basin's future water resources availability and drought indicators, despite a considerable uncertainty of results from the mid-century onwards.