Reservoir Sizing at Draft Level of 75% of Mean Annual Flow Using Drought Magnitude Based Method on Canadian Rivers

• Main Authors: Tribeni C. Sharma, Umed S. Panu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-05-01
• Series: Hydrology
• Subjects: drought magnitude; draft level; extreme number theorem; Markov chain; moving average smoothing; standardized hydrological index
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2306-5338/8/2/79

On a global basis, there is trend that a majority of reservoirs are sized using a draft of 75% of the mean annual flow (0.75 MAF). The reservoir volumes based on the proposed drought magnitude (DM) method and the sequent peak algorithm (SPA) at 0.75 MAF draft were compared at the annual, monthly and weekly scales using the flow sequences of 25 Canadian rivers. In our assessment, the monthly scale is adequate for such analyses. The DM method, although capable of using flow data at any time scale, has been demonstrated using monthly standardized hydrological index (SHI) sequences. The moving average (MA) smoothing of the monthly SHI sequences formed the basis in the DM method for estimating the reservoir volume through the use of the extreme number theorem, and the hypothesis that drought magnitude is equal to the product of the drought intensity and drought length. The truncation level in the SHI sequences was found as SHIo [ = (0.75 ‒ 1) µo/σo], where µo and σo are the overall mean and standard deviation of the monthly flows. The DM-based estimates for the deficit volumes and the SPA-based reservoir volumes were found comparable within an error margin of ±18%.