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Global Storage-Reliability-Yield Relationships for Water Supply Reservoirs

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Abstract

Storage-Reliability-Yield (SRY) relationships are used to determine the reservoir storage capacity for delivery of a specified yield with a given reliability, or to compute the yield and/or reliability of an existing reservoir system. Several studies have developed generalized SRY relations using synthetic inflows arising from a variety of theoretical streamflow models. Fewer studies have used actual streamflow datasets to develop generalized SRY relationships and most of those studies were for small geographic regions. This study uses a global dataset of monthly streamflows combined with robust regression methods to develop improved generalized SRY models suitable for use anywhere in the world. Comparisons are provided between the models developed here and other studies documenting a number of innovations over previous relationships. In cross validation experiments our global reservoir yield model exhibited extremely high goodness-of-fit with values of Nash Sutcliffe Efficiency and adjusted R2 values both always in excess of 0.99 and negligible bias. The resulting SRY model should prove useful in screening studies which seek to evaluate the benefits of constructing reservoirs for surface water supply.

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Acknowledgments

We are indebted to Murray Peel, Thomas McMahon and Geoffrey Pegram for sharing the global dataset of monthly streamflow upon which this study is based, and for their encouragement and support of our efforts. We are further indebted to the Fulbright Foundation and Tufts University for their support of this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Tufts University, Medford, MA, 02155, USA

    Faith W. Kuria & Richard M. Vogel

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  1. Faith W. Kuria
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  2. Richard M. Vogel
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Correspondence to Faith W. Kuria.

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Kuria, F.W., Vogel, R.M. Global Storage-Reliability-Yield Relationships for Water Supply Reservoirs. Water Resour Manage 29, 1591–1605 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-014-0896-4

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