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Improving the determination of reservoir capacities for drought control

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Abstract

Reliable methods of determining reservoir capacities are becoming more and more necessary to improve the planning and management of water resources. Due to its easy use and solid technical and scientific basis, the Reservoir Operation Study has been widely utilized by engineers. However, this method is limited by its strong dependence on the available database. This study was undertaken to propose potential modifications to the Reservoir Operation Study to overcome its problems, namely the strong dependence upon the first year of the time series and inability of associating the reservoir storage capacity with a frequency (return period). To make the reservoir capacity independent from the first year of the time series, we created (N − 1) synthetic series of streamflows (N = the number of years in the time series) and applied the Reservoir Operation Study method to each one. To associate the reservoir capacity with a frequency factor (return period), we applied a Gumbel distribution to the reservoir capacity estimated from each one of the synthetic series. For β-values (proportion of the average streamflow to be regulated) greater than or equal to 0.75, the proposed method efficiently overcame the aforementioned limitation regarding the method’s dependence on the database. The association of storage capacities with return periods greater than the length of the time series, which is presented in this work, also considerably improves the Reservoir Operation Study method.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Federal University of Viçosa, Viçosa, 36570-000, Brazil

    Aline de Araújo Nunes

  2. Agricultural Engineering Department, Federal University of Viçosa, Viçosa, Brazil

    Fernando Falco Pruski

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  1. Aline de Araújo Nunes
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  2. Fernando Falco Pruski
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Correspondence to Aline de Araújo Nunes.

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de Araújo Nunes, A., Pruski, F.F. Improving the determination of reservoir capacities for drought control. Stoch Environ Res Risk Assess 29, 183–191 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00477-014-0950-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00477-014-0950-z

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