Ven Te Chow Faculty Scholar in Water Resources University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Dams and reservoirs play a major role in flood damage prevention. In recent decades, climate change and water demand changes have brought great challenges to the operation of flood control reservoirs. This study explores the operational changes during 1990-2020 for 140+ reservoirs used primarily for flood control in the Contiguous United States (CONUS). With daily operation records, trend tests are first performed for several annual statistical variables of storage and release time series, which finds significant changes for some reservoirs. Then we improve a generic data-driven reservoir operation model (GDROM) for better simulation of the operation during flood events, and apply the model to analyzing the operation modules, application conditions, and operation pattern changes for each of the reservoirs. In particular, the statistical analysis shows that many flood control reservoirs in the Ohio River Basin and the Arkansas-White-Red River Basin experienced significant changes. The GDROM results also tell the details of the operation pattern changes. We compare the representative operation patterns versus the changing characteristics (i.e., the trend test results on the annual statistical variables and the module application frequency) of the reservoirs from different regions in CONUS to better understand the typical operation patterns. In addition, several reservoirs are chosen to explore the reasons behind the operational changes. This study can help understand real-world flood control reservoir operations, especially the operational changes in recent decades, which may guide the operation improvement in the changing environment.
