THE ROLE OF RESERVOIR OPERATION IN DROUGHT MITIGATION: A CASE STUDY FROM DAREH-RUD BASIN

Dealing with droughts in a river basin presents many challenges in managing a water resources system. Occurrence of severe and persistent droughts depletes reservoirs storage to critical levels, which may lead to future water supply disaster. This paper illustrates certain benefits of using specific rules for reservoir operation to help manage water resources system in Dareh-rud river basin in Iran. If a drought occurs and insufficient amount of water is stored in the reservoirs, the state of future water supply will be critical. To conserve water and to minimize the impact of a severe drought in the future, reservoirs must be operated under certain restriction. The proposed approach of this paper is suitable for considering the climatic information into the reservoir operation through an integrated approach. Results indicate that operating schedules which considers drought monitoring are significantly different from those obtained from an experiment that does not consider this issue. From the standpoint of water resources decision-making, the proposed approach has a potential to incorporate drought state of the basin into water resources related decisions.

Keywords:

Regional Drought Analysis , Reservoir Operation , Hedging Rules , Dareh-rud , Iran