Water Supply System Evaluation

Water Supply System Evaluation • Planning • Drought Operation and Management • Environmental Impacts Evaluation • Water Quality Management

Drought Operations and Management

Drought can cause great damage in terms of human suffering, economic loss, and environmental impact. Drought can affect every region of the country and every sector of the economy. Planning for drought to mitigate its effects allows decision-makers to take actions that reduce the most damage at the least cost. Municipal and agricultural water suppliers, and water users should develop a contingency plan that includes short and long-term mitigation actions.

HydroLogics helps its clients develop information about system capability. We assist our clients to:

An integral part of the analysis process is an interactive computer simulation which allows the development of information in both real-time and in the long-term. Key to the analysis is a routine to generate conditional streamflow forecasts. Using current streamflow as a surrogate for soil moisture conditions, the forecaster generates multiple equally-likely sequences of future flows. These equally-likely traces are used to assess the probability of certain outcomes in the future.

The real-time model starts with current conditions and uses streamflow forecasts through the end of the drought year. The model generates probabilistic information about future storage levels given the forecasts, projected demands and a user-specified operating policy. By using it iteratively to investigate different operation policies, the client will be able to achieve a better balance between the risk of failure, the hardship associated with the imposition of demand restrictions, and the ecological stress that would result from reduced instream flows.

The long-term simulation mode can be used to refine the safe yield estimate of the reservoir and to provide a more complete assessment of its adequacy. It can also used to test various drought management strategies to ascertain which combinations of reliability and demand reductions would have worked well during past droughts. Knowing that a strategy would have worked well during past droughts increases ones confidence that it will work well in the future.

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