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Presented at the NABS Annual meeting, Anchorage, Alaska, 2006
in Watershed Science in Surface Drinking Water Supplies 1
Integrating water supply management and environmental flow requirements
C.D. Apse1, R.M. Vogel2, A. Huber-Lee3, M.P. Smith4, J. Sieber3, and S.A. Archfield2.1The Nature Conservancy, 108 Main Street, New Paltz, NY 12561, U.S.A. , 2Tufts University, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Medford, MA 02133, U.S.A. , 3The Stockholm Environment Institute, 11 Arlington St., Boston, MA 02116, U.S.A. , 4The Nature Conservancy, 11 Avenue De Lafayette, 5th Floor, Boston, MA 02111-1736, U.S.A
Balancing human and environmental water resource needs is critical to sustainability and conservation of aquatic-dependent species globally. There are established approaches for determining how to operate reservoir systems to provide a reliable and resilient source of water for human needs. Similarly, an extensive literature documents approaches for determining environmental flow needs downstream of reservoirs. However, the literature which deals with the impact of various reservoir operating rules on environmental flow goals is limited to a few site-specific case studies that do not lend themselves to generalization. We have adapted the Water Evaluation And Planning model (WEAP) in an effort to explore the relationship between reservoir storage and associated properties of environmental flow and water supply yield for a range of reservoir operating rules. Our results demonstrate general relationships between reservoir operating rule, storage volume, watershed inflows, and desired releases for environmental flows. We also demonstrate which environmental flow policies lead to the most favorable tradeoffs between ecological and human uses of water and how the nature of these tradeoffs varies with the storage and yield ratios of the reservoir system. By employing the generalized WEAP model, our results will be useable as a decision support system for water managers globally.
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