TY - JOUR
T1 - Exploring How Changing Monsoonal Dynamics and Human Pressures Challenge Multireservoir Management for Flood Protection, Hydropower Production, and Agricultural Water Supply
AU - Quinn, J. D.
AU - Reed, P. M.
AU - Giuliani, M.
AU - Castelletti, A.
AU - Oyler, J. W.
AU - Nicholas, R. E.
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors would like to thank Jery Stedinger, Todd Walter, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions and comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. This study was partially supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through the Network for Sustainable Climate Risk Management (SCRiM) under NSF cooperative agreement GEO-1240507 and the Penn State Center for Climate Risk Management. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding entities. We also acknowledge the World Climate Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP, and we thank the climate modeling groups (listed in Table S10 of the supporting information) for producing and making available their model output. For CMIP, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison provides coordinating support and led development of software infrastructure in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals. Code and detailed step-by-step algorithm documentation of the climate downscaling can be found at https://github.com/scrim-network/ red_river. All other data used in this study are from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) of Vietnam and were collected during the IMRR project (http://xake.elet.polimi.it/imrr/). Because the code for the model, Figures 3–5, 7c and 7f, and S2–S4 contains governmental information on hydropower plants, demand, and streamflow in the basin that is protected by a nondisclosure agreement with the Vietnamese government, it cannot be made public. The code for all other figures can be found at https://github.com/julianneq/ RedRiver_MonsoonalDynamics, and the code for the synthetic streamflow generator can be found at https://github.com/julianneq/ Kirsch-Nowak_Streamflow_Generator using data for the Susquehanna River basin instead of the Red River basin as an example. Please contact the authors to obtain other data or model results.
Funding Information:
The authors would like to thank Jery Stedinger, Todd Walter, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions and comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. This study was partially supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through the Network for Sustainable Climate Risk Management (SCRiM) under NSF cooperative agreement GEO-1240507 and the Penn State Center for Climate Risk Management. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding entities. We also acknowledge the World Climate Programme's Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP, and we thank the climate modeling groups (listed in Table S10 of the supporting information) for producing and making available their model output. For CMIP, the U.S. Department of Energy's Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison provides coordinating support and led development of software infrastructure in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals. Code and detailed step-by-step algorithm documentation of the climate downscaling can be found at https://github.com/scrim-network/red_river. All other data used in this study are from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) of Vietnam and were collected during the IMRR project (http://xake.elet.polimi.it/imrr/). Because the code for the model, Figures ?, c and f, and S2?S4 contains governmental information on hydropower plants, demand, and streamflow in the basin that is protected by a nondisclosure agreement with the Vietnamese government, it cannot be made public. The code for all other figures can be found at https://github.com/julianneq/RedRiver_MonsoonalDynamics, and the code for the synthetic streamflow generator can be found at https://github.com/julianneq/Kirsch-Nowak_Streamflow_Generator using data for the Susquehanna River basin instead of the Red River basin as an example. Please contact the authors to obtain other data or model results.
Publisher Copyright:
©2018. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.
PY - 2018/7
Y1 - 2018/7
N2 - Multireservoir systems require robust and adaptive control policies capable of managing hydroclimatic variability and human demands across a range of time scales. This is especially true for river basins with high intraannual and interannual variability, such as monsoonal systems that need to buffer against seasonal droughts while also managing extreme floods. Moreover, the timing, intensity, duration, and frequency of these hydrologic extremes may evolve with deeply uncertain changes in socioeconomic and climatic pressures. This study contributes an innovative method for exploring how possible changes in the timing and magnitude of the monsoonal cycle impact the robustness of reservoir operating policies designed assuming stationary hydrologic and socioeconomic conditions. We illustrate this analysis on the Red River basin in Vietnam, where reservoirs and dams serve as important sources of hydropower production, multisectoral water supply, and flood protection for the capital city of Hanoi. Applying our scenario discovery approach, we find that reservoir operations designed assuming stationarity provide robust hydropower performance in the Red River but that increased mean streamflow, amplification of the within-year monsoonal cycle, and increased interannual variability all threaten their ability to manage flood risk. Additionally, increased agricultural water demands can only be tolerated if they are accompanied by greater mean flow, exacerbating food-flood trade-offs in the basin. These findings highlight the importance of exploring the impacts of a wide range of deeply uncertain socioeconomic and hydrologic factors when evaluating system robustness in monsoonal river basins, considering in particular both lower-order moments of annual streamflow and intraannual monsoonal behavior.
AB - Multireservoir systems require robust and adaptive control policies capable of managing hydroclimatic variability and human demands across a range of time scales. This is especially true for river basins with high intraannual and interannual variability, such as monsoonal systems that need to buffer against seasonal droughts while also managing extreme floods. Moreover, the timing, intensity, duration, and frequency of these hydrologic extremes may evolve with deeply uncertain changes in socioeconomic and climatic pressures. This study contributes an innovative method for exploring how possible changes in the timing and magnitude of the monsoonal cycle impact the robustness of reservoir operating policies designed assuming stationary hydrologic and socioeconomic conditions. We illustrate this analysis on the Red River basin in Vietnam, where reservoirs and dams serve as important sources of hydropower production, multisectoral water supply, and flood protection for the capital city of Hanoi. Applying our scenario discovery approach, we find that reservoir operations designed assuming stationarity provide robust hydropower performance in the Red River but that increased mean streamflow, amplification of the within-year monsoonal cycle, and increased interannual variability all threaten their ability to manage flood risk. Additionally, increased agricultural water demands can only be tolerated if they are accompanied by greater mean flow, exacerbating food-flood trade-offs in the basin. These findings highlight the importance of exploring the impacts of a wide range of deeply uncertain socioeconomic and hydrologic factors when evaluating system robustness in monsoonal river basins, considering in particular both lower-order moments of annual streamflow and intraannual monsoonal behavior.
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U2 - 10.1029/2018WR022743
DO - 10.1029/2018WR022743
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85050795465
VL - 54
SP - 4638
EP - 4662
JO - Water Resources Research
JF - Water Resources Research
SN - 0043-1397
IS - 7
ER -