Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management

Semiarid regions are critical for water supply due to deficits in the water balance caused by low precipitation and high evaporation rates. This work studied 50 reservoirs in the Brazilian semiarid region, analyzing the impact of different operational rules on the volumetric reliability ($VR$) of reservoirs in meeting the demand in relation to the Yield-Evaporation-Spill (YES) effect. Adopting rules with higher rationing reduced overall $VR$, which varied according to the climatic period (i.e., wet or dry), but improved the reservoirs’ ability to meet human and animal water needs. Moreover, we verified the relationship between the morphohydric characteristics of the reservoirs and the YES relationship, including the relationship between these characteristics and the reservoirs’ ability to meet priority demands. In general, in many cases, large losses due to evaporation and spills were observed and may indicate inappropriate use of reserved resources due to climatic characteristics and improper operation of the reservoirs.

Globally, interbasin water transfer (IBWT) projects worth $2.7 trillion seek to address existing and potential future water scarcity concerns. IBWTs present a challenging decision context with complex operational dynamics and conflicting objectives. Information-based coordination between donor and recipient basins is likely to play a role in the success of these large-scale projects, so it is important to explore its potential impact. We developed an IBWT design framework to quantify the multiobjective gains from information coordination between participating basins. For a large-scale IBWT in Southern India, we compared four design paradigms in which transfer decisions are based on (1) the storage states of both reservoirs (cooperative), (2) the storage state of the donor reservoir only (noncooperative), (3) the rule proposed by regional authorities, and (4) status quo (no transfer). The evolutionary multiobjective direct policy search (EMODPS) framework was used to discover the state-aware control strategies that compose the trade-offs between flood protection, demand satisfaction, and environmental flow maintenance. We found that cooperative strategies are substantially more efficient in balancing conflicting objectives, utilizing much lower annual transfers ($\mathrm{6,460}\pm \mathrm{2,600}{\mathrm{Mm}}^3$) compared with noncooperative strategies ($\mathrm{9,728}\pm \mathrm{5,000}{\mathrm{Mm}}^3$), and both outperform the proposed regional rule ($\mathrm{16,400}{\mathrm{Mm}}^3$).

This work assessed the effects of joint operation on the performance of multipurpose, multireservoir systems vis-à-vis standalone operation. The analysis used the multipurpose Pong and Bhakra reservoirs in northern India. Zone-based rule curves with or without hedging optimized using genetic algorithms were used for operating the reservoirs. The results showed that standalone configurations without hedging produced irrigation water reliability exceeding 90%, but the vulnerability indices (40% for Pong and 58% for Bhakra) were also high. Hedging tempered the standalone vulnerability; however, integrated operation also caused the vulnerability to reduce without hedging. Flood control was also enhanced during the flood season, with flood freeboard increasing by 12 and 3 m, respectively, at Bhakra and Pong reservoirs, relative to nonoptimized operation. Hydropower generation was lower than installed capacity at both reservoirs for both standalone and joint operations. The main conclusion of the study is that although hedging will moderate the vulnerability of standalone systems, the same outcome can be achieved without the deliberate water rationing of hedging if reservoirs are operated jointly.

Inspection and maintenance (M&R) of a buried network of stormwater drainage pipes is a challenging task for asset engineers due to a large number of pipes and restricted access. A Markov-based inspection model with a computational procedure was developed to estimate the lowest-cost inspection interval for various pipe conditions and an average total of M&R cost. The computational procedure is based on the innovative application of Markov deterioration model, the cost rate function, and Monte Carlo simulation. The results from a real case study show that the lowest-cost inspection intervals for stormwater pipe assets with a starting good condition of 1 are obtained between 9 and 11 years. The average number of undetected failure condition due to longer inspection interval is also presented and can be important in selecting the inspection interval when failure risk is concerned. The effect of penalty cost is shown to affect both the average cost rate and lowest-cost inspection interval. The annual interest rate is found to have a significant effect on total cost but has no impact on inspection interval.

This work focuses on developing methods to better manage significant imbalances between water supply and demand during droughts. A service-driven approach (Model as a Service, or MaaS) is used to couple river modeling services with optimization services for determining optimal water allocation strategies under daily drought scenarios. It demonstrates the promise of coupling simulation-optimization model services to improve real-time water management in a service driven framework, which should be beneficial to many other water resource applications. The approach is implemented using the DataWolf workflow tool and AzureML Cloud machine learning services and applied to an April 2015 drought event in the Upper Guadalupe River Basin, Texas. Weather and water demand uncertainty are considered through scenario-based optimization. The optimization objective is to minimize the daily total curtailment hours across all groups of permit holders. The scenario analysis shows that the current permit grouping system has a significant impact on the optimal water allocation strategy. The scenarios also demonstrate that noncompliance of junior water users is predicted to have a much greater effect on the river system than noncompliance of senior water users. The resulting framework can be deployed for water allocation in any area by updating water user information, water allocation policy constraints, and river data that can be obtained from publicly available sources.

Droughts are recurrent natural hazards that can strongly affect human activities and the natural dynamics of ecosystems. Strategies for drought risk management and mitigation depend on how rainfall shortages translate into water deficits in soil, streams, and aquifers. From this perspective, this paper investigates, with the use of standardized drought indexes, the propagation mechanisms from meteorological to hydrological droughts in the São Francisco River catchment, providing an assessment of the times of propagation and of influential physical and climatological factors. In addition, we explore a potential framework for predicting the times of propagation in locations with no streamflow information. The study results demonstrated that, while no marked distinctions in the meteorological drought statistics are verified across the study region, spatial patterns are observed in those of hydrological droughts, implying different mechanisms for drought propagation. Moreover, the prediction models demonstrated acceptable capacity, despite the complexity of the propagation physical processes. Hence, notwithstanding some modeling limitations, the proposed approach may constitute a useful auxiliary tool for hydrological drought forecasting and early warning at regional scale.

The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic induced many countries, including Italy, to implement social distancing measures and to suspend the majority of educational and working activities, which significantly impacted peoples’ lifestyles. To support water utilities in understanding the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on water consumption and improving water distribution system resilience, the effects of the lockdown were investigated with reference to a residential district metered area (DMA) in the city of Rovigo (northern Italy), in which smart monitoring of water consumption at the level of individual users started in 2019. The water consumption recorded during the lockdown period was analyzed at different levels of temporal and spatial aggregation and compared with the consumption recorded in the same period of the previous year. The results show that, during the lockdown period, the overall water consumption in this mainly residential area increased by 18%. Moreover, water consumption was observed to be more spread out over the day, with a decrease (and a delay) in peak morning consumption, which was particularly evident on weekdays.

This study presents a process that uses the method of alliances, conflicts, tactics, objectives, and recommendations (MACTOR) to inform integrated water resources management (IWRM) strategies for complex, multiorganization hydroelectric projects. This process is applied to the Alto Maipo Hydroelectric Project (AMHP) in Chile. The process enabled qualitative and quantitative insight on the interconnected aspects of alignment and conflict between AMHP organizations by mapping the battlefield on which they converge or diverge based on their organizational objectives and relative levels of influence. Study findings reveal environmental protection and water provision as the core objectives around which conflicts center. Study findings also point to a nuanced power struggle between state and local organizations that undermines project productivity. Project recommendations focus on improving communication and collaboration between aligned yet siloed organizations and on improving the mechanisms for information flow and advocacy for the local community and governmental organizations. These findings demonstrate the utility of the MACTOR approach—as it is applied within the proposed process—as a way to inform IWRM strategies for multiorganization hydroelectric projects from a systems perspective.

The role of private tanks is to provide excess storage to the consumer to satisfy the water demand. However, they are disregarded during the design stage, in favor of simplified network analysis. This affects the accuracy of the simulation because vital components, such as tank inlets and volume sizes, are completely ignored. Hence, the purpose of this study is to demonstrate the effectiveness of advanced modeling of water distribution networks (WDNs), encompassing the presence of local private tanks, to determine the optimum values of different parameters of private tanks by conducting time- and volume-based reliability analyses. Two network models are used to perform the analysis: a small sample network and a real network that resembles the area of Dubai Silicon Oasis, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The results obtained from the simulation of networks indicated that the lowest orifice and volume sizes to achieve the required reliability of unity is the optimum values. Furthermore, it implied that any change in their optimum values would either result in tank failure or increase in the head loss and carbon footprint of the network.