Water Supply Reliability of a Joint Rainwater Storage and On-Stream Reservoir System
Publication: Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 147, Issue 9
Abstract
Rainwater is regarded as an alternative water source for water supply augmentation in metropolitan areas to mitigate rising water stress caused by increasing population and climate change. There exists a knowledge gap in the evaluation of rainwater-harvesting systems to increase urban water supply reliability. This study provides insight into the impacts of developing rainwater-harvesting systems to improve urban water supply reliability by modeling joint water supplies from both decentralized rainwater-harvesting systems and centralized stream reservoirs. The model is then applied to Melbourne, Australia, using two rainfall regimes. The results show that enlarging roof areas and rainwater tanks, especially for new homes, can increase volumetric rainwater supply reliability at the household scale. This not only increases supply for households but also increases water supply reliability of stream reservoirs at the regional scale. An average roof area of and an average tank size of 8–10 KL can harvest enough rainwater in Melbourne to increase reservoir water supply reliability to 90% for current urban water demand during an extended drought. Using these results, efficient sizes for rainwater tanks are determined by analyzing the cost of enlarging a tank compared with its marginal benefit of increasing rainwater supply reliability. Furthermore, the impacts of climate variability and demand seasonality on system performance are explored using storage-reliability-yield curves for rainwater-harvesting systems. These results provide general insights regarding the feasibility of rainwater water supply augmentation constrained by tank size, roof area, rainfall regime, and demand seasonality. The proposed method for coupling a rainwater tank model at the household scale with a reservoir model at the regional scale is transferable to the design of regional rainwater-harvesting strategies in other cities.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all of the data, models, or code that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon request.
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Melbourne monthly rainfall and evaporation data from 1979 to 2009;
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Melbourne monthly urban water demand from 1979 to 2009;
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Melbourne monthly inflows of major reservoirs from 1979 to 2009; and
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FORTRAN and GAMS code for the joint water supplies model.
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51909035 and U2040206) and the Open Research Fund Program of the State Key Laboratory of Hydroscience and Engineering (sklhse-2019-Iow09).
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Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 147 • Issue 9 • September 2021
Copyright
© 2021 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Nov 22, 2019
Accepted: Mar 1, 2021
Published online: Jun 28, 2021
Published in print: Sep 1, 2021
Discussion open until: Nov 28, 2021
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