Integrated Multiple Purpose Reservoir System Operations

Abstract

Water resources management, development, allocation, and protection in system engineering has become increasingly essential to ensure sustainability, protect the ecosystem, and raise water availability. Depending on the reservoirs built over time and the streamflow conditions identified for environmental protection, river basin management strategies are designated in multi-objective gains by subjecting river system rules. Increased complexities caused by drought and flooding and constantly varying water demands result in the change among reliability of water supply on river basin areas. Due to these changes, interactions and tradeoffs between integrated water operations are observed depending on the priority of storage and allocation. The proposed research analyzes the interactions between hydropower generation, flood control operations, and environmental flow standards on the case study area of Brazos River Basin by simulating Brazos Water Availability Modeling (WAM) dataset with the daily and monthly versions of the Water Rights Analysis Package (WRAP) modeling system. Real-world reservoir system operations, river system rules, and water management strategies are investigated and WRAP capabilities for simulating hydropower generation, flood control operations, and environmental flows are explored. The case study area is analyzed and depending on the structure of the river/reservoir system, different water allocation scenarios are formulated to define the degree to interactions between water resources operations in the basin area. Simulations are performed in daily and monthly computational time steps in a period between 1940 and 2017 by modeling operational procedures applied in river and reservoir systems to increase the accuracy of the system. Additionally, comparative analysis between daily versus monthly river/reservoir modeling systems are performed for hydropower generation and instream flows by comparing energy output and streamflow metrics. The Hydrologic Engineering Center (HEC) Statistical Software Package (SSP) and Data Storage System (DSS) are used to monitor reservoir storage and develop frequency analyses based on log-normal and log-Pearson Type III probability distribution methods. TABLES program of the WRAP modeling system is applied to develop reliability and yield analyses for water and flow rights, define streamflow metrics at pertinent control points, and develop flood frequency analyses at reservoirs and stream gages.