Inferring the forecast-use signatures of 300 dams across Western United States
Abstract
Medium to long-range forecasts are expected to guide reservoir release decisions to support water management objectives, including mitigating flood and drought risks. Yet consistent data describing how and when forecasts are applied in practice remains undeveloped. This lack of knowledge hinders our ability to develop adequate models of reservoirs operations, which are required for a variety of applications including large-scale hydrology models as well as models used to generate forecasts of regulated flows. We address this issue by estimating seasonally-varying forecast use signatures for more than 300 dams located predominantly in Western United States. We take actual forward observed reservoir inflows as a proxy for the forecast available to the operator, and then identify for each week of the year the forward horizon that results in the closest piecewise relationship between release and forecasted water availability (current reservoir storage plus cumulative future inflow). Resulting "forecast-use signatures" specify for each dam the estimated forecast horizon used by the operator for each week of the water year. These data not only shed light on the nature and extent of forecast use at existing dams. They also unlock significant improvements in our ability to capture operator behavior in simulation, including under flood and drought conditions. This is demonstrated using a 1/8th degree distributed hydrology model of the Columbia River Basin.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFM.H33P2247T
- Keywords:
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- 1816 Estimation and forecasting;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1833 Hydroclimatology;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 6309 Decision making under uncertainty;
- POLICY SCIENCES & PUBLIC ISSUES;
- 6344 System operation and management;
- POLICY SCIENCES & PUBLIC ISSUES