Abstract
Hydrological models within inflow forecasting systems for high-alpine hydropower reservoirs can provide valuable information as part of a decision support system for the improvement of hydropower production or flood retention. The information, especially concerning runoff, is however rarely available for the calibration of the hydrological models used. Therefore, a method is presented to derive local runoff from secondary information for the calibration of the model parameters of the rainfallrunoff model COSERO. Changes in water levels in reservoirs, reservoir outflows, discharge measurements at water intakes and in transport lines are thereby used to derive the local, “natural” flow for a given sub-catchment. The proposed method is applied within a research study for the ÖBB Infrastructure Railsystem division in the Stubache catchment in the central Austrian Alps. Here, the ÖBB operates the hydropower scheme “Kraftwerksgruppe Stubachtal”, which consists of 7 reservoirs and 4 hydropower stations. The hydrological model has been set up considering this human influences and the high natural heterogeneity in topography and land cover, including glaciers. Overall, the hydrological model performs mostly well for the catchment with highest NSE values of 0.78 for the calibration and 0.79 for the validation period, also considering the use of homogeneous parameter fields and the uncertainty of the derived local discharge values. The derived runoff data proved to be useful information for the model calibration. Further analysis, examining the water balance and its components as well as snow cover, showed satisfactory simulation results. In conclusion, a unique runoff dataset for a small scale high-alpine catchment has been created to establish a hydrological flow prediction model which in a further step can be used for improved and sustainable hydropower management.
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13 June 2018
The article Hydrological modelling in the anthroposphere: predicting local runoff in a heavily modified high-alpine catchment, written by Johannes WESEMANN, Mathew HERRNEGGER and Karsten SCHULZ, was mistakenly originally published without open access. After publication in volume 15, issue 5, page 921-938 this was corrected and the article was made an open access publication. Therefore, the copyright of the article has been changed to © The Author(s) 2018 and the article is forthwith distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, duplication, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The original article has been corrected.
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Acknowledgments
This study was funded by the ÖBB Infrastructure. The authors thank ÖBB Infrastructure, namely Markus Wippersberger and Michaela Haberler-Weber, for the financial support and fruitful cooperation enabling this contribution.
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The original version of this article was revised to add the missing Open Access designation.
A correction to this article is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-018-4979-1
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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, duplication, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.
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Wesemann, J., Herrnegger, M. & Schulz, K. Hydrological modelling in the anthroposphere: predicting local runoff in a heavily modified high-alpine catchment. J. Mt. Sci. 15, 921–938 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-017-4587-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-017-4587-5