Developing A Risk-Based Framework For Drought Contingency

Increasing water demand and the potential for increased occurrences and severity of drought add new challenges for reservoir operation. Drought contingency plans (DCP) aid drought mitigation by providing tools for timely identification of drought and for coordinating temporary operational deviations. However, policy deviations require full risk and uncertainty assessments for approval. This paper proposes a methodology to update the Pine Flat Reservoir DCP originally published in 1992 to include tools to expedite approval of operation deviations. The methodology includes a probabilistic hydrologic hazard approach to estimate current and future risks. The method combines a stochastic weather generator, outputs of global climate models, a hydrological model and a reservoir model in a Monte Carlo simulation framework to generate patterns of hydrologic loads. The method allows the development of unconditional (all possible hydrological events) and conditional (possible events conditioned to current conditions) hazard curves, taking into consideration possible climate change scenarios.