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Development of a Demand Driven Hydro-climatic Model for Drought Planning

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Abstract

In recent years, droughts with increasing severity and frequency have been experienced around the world due to climate change effects. Water planning and management during droughts needs to deal with water demand variability, uncertainties in streamflow prediction, conflicts over water resources allocation, and the absence of necessary emergency schemes in drought situations. Reservoirs could play an important role in drought mitigation; therefore, development of an algorithm for operation of reservoirs in drought periods could help to mitigate the drought impacts by reducing the expected water shortages. For this purpose, the probable drought’s characteristics and their variations in response to factors such as climate change should be incorporated. This study aims at developing a contingency planning scheme for operation of reservoirs in drought periods using hedging rules with the objective of decreasing the maximum water deficit. The case study for evaluation of the performance of the proposed algorithm is the Sattarkhan reservoir in the Aharchay watershed, located in the northwestern part of Iran. The trend evaluations of the hydro-climatic variables show that the climate change has already affected streamflow in the region and has increased water scarcity and drought severity. To incorporate the climate change study in reservoir planning; streamflow should be simulated under climate change impacts. For this purpose, the climatic variables including temperature and precipitation in the future under climate change impacts are simulated using downscaled GCM (General Circulation Model) outputs to derive scenarios for possible future drought events. Then a hydrological model is developed to simulate the river streamflow, based on the downscaled data. The results show that the proposed methodology leads to less water deficit and decreases the drought damages in the study area.

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Acknowledgments

This study was done at University of Tehran as a part of a drought management project entitled “Revisiting Water Supply and Demand, and Drought Management in the Aharchay Watershed” sponsored by the East Azarbayjan water authority.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Polytechnic Institute of NYU, Brooklyn, NY, USA

    Mohammad Karamouz

  2. School of Civil Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

    Sanaz Imen & Sara Nazif

  3. University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

    Mohammad Karamouz

Authors
  1. Mohammad Karamouz
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  2. Sanaz Imen
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  3. Sara Nazif
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Correspondence to Mohammad Karamouz.

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Karamouz, M., Imen, S. & Nazif, S. Development of a Demand Driven Hydro-climatic Model for Drought Planning. Water Resour Manage 26, 329–357 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-011-9920-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-011-9920-0

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