Streamflow Forecast and Reservoir Operation Performance Assessment Under Climate Change

This study attempts to investigate potential impacts of future climate change on streamflow and reservoir operation performance in a Northern American Prairie watershed. System Dynamics is employed as an effective methodology to organize and integrate existing information available on climate change scenarios, watershed hydrologic processes, reservoir operation and water resource assessment system. The second version of the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis Coupled Global Climate Model is selected to generate the climate change scenarios with daily climatic data series for hydrologic modeling. Watershed-based hydrologic and reservoir water dynamics modeling focuses on dynamic processes of both streamflow generation driven by climatic conditions, and the reservoir water dynamics based on reservoir operation rules. The reliability measure describes the effectiveness of present reservoir operation rules to meet various demands which are assumed to remain constant for the next 100 years in order to focus the study on the understanding of the structure and the behaviour of the water supply. Simulation results demonstrate that future climate variation and change may bring more high-peak-streamflow occurrences and more abundant water resources. Current reservoir operation rules can provide a high reliability in drought protection and flood control. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010