Abstract
Droughts are a major threat to water resources systems management. Timely anticipation results crucial to defining strategies and measures to minimise their effects. Water managers make use of monitoring systems in order to characterise and assess drought risk by means of indices and indicators. However, there are few systems currently in operation that are capable of providing early warning with regard to the occurrence of a drought episode. This paper proposes a novel methodology to support and complement drought monitoring and early warning in regulated water resources systems. It is based in the combined use of two models, a water resources optimization model and a stochastic streamflow generation model, to generate a series of results that allow evaluating the future state of the system. The results for the period 1998–2009 in the Jucar River Basin (Spain) show that accounting for scenario change risk can be beneficial for basin managers by providing them with information on the current and future drought situation at any given moment. Our results show that the combination of scenario change probabilities with the current drought monitoring system can represent a major advance towards improved drought management in the future, and add a significant value to the existing national State Index (SI) approach for early warning purposes.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 36-45 |
Number of pages | 10 |
Journal | Journal of Hydrology |
Volume | 544 |
Early online date | 14 Nov 2016 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Jan 2017 |
Bibliographical note
AcknowledgementsThe authors thank the Confederación Hidrográfica del Jucar for providing data and support to build the models. We also thank the comments and language revision of Dr. Jerry Knox that helped improving the overall quality of the article.
This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (CGL2009-11798, CGL2012-34978, and CSD2009-00065), and the European Commission FP7 programme (FP7-ENV-2011-282769 and FP7-ENV-2012-308438).
Keywords
- Monitoring
- Early warning system
- optimisation modelling
- water resources systems analysis
- aquatool