Mitigating Drought Conditions under Climate and Land Use Changes by Applying Hedging Rules for the Multi-Reservoir System

Climate and land use changes have substantially affected hydrologic cycles and increased the risk of drought. Reservoirs are one of the important means to provide resilience against hydrologic variability and achieve sustainable water management. Therefore, adaptive reservoir operating rules are needed to mitigate their adverse effects. In this study, the Hanjiang River Basin in southeast China was selected as the study area. Future climate and land use projections were produced by the Delta method and CA-Markov model, respectively. Future climate forcings and land use patterns were then incorporated into a distributed hydrologic model to evaluate river flow regime shifts. Results revealed that climate and land use changes may lead to severe drought conditions in the future. Lower flows are shown to be more sensitive to environmental changes and a decline of monthly flows could reach up to nearly 30% in the dry season. To address the threat of increasing drought uncertainties in the water supply system, the aggregation-decomposition method incorporated with hedging rules was applied to guide the multi-reservoir operation. Parameters of optimal hedging rules were obtained by a multi-objective optimization algorithm. The performance of hedging rules was evaluated by comparison to standard operating policies and conventional operating rules with respect to reliability, resiliency, vulnerability, and sustainability indices. Results showed that the multi-reservoir system guided by hedging rules can be more adaptive to the environmental changes.

Integrated Operation of Multi-Reservoir and Many-Objective System Using Fuzzified Hedging Rule and Strength Pareto Evolutionary Optimization Algorithm (SPEA2)

In this paper, a many-objective optimization algorithm was developed using SPEA2 for a system of four reservoirs in the Karun basin, including hydropower, municipal and industrial, agricultural, and environmental objectives. For this purpose, using 53 years of available data, hedging rules were developed in two modes: with and without applying fuzzy logic. SPEA2 was used to optimize hedging coefficients using the first 43 years of data and the last 10 years of data were used to test the optimized rule curves. The results were compared with those of non-hedging methods, including the standard operating procedures (SOP) and water evaluation and planning (WEAP) model. The results indicate that the combination of fuzzy logic and hedging rules in a many-objectives system is more efficient than the discrete hedging rule alone. For instance, the reliability of the hydropower requirement in the fuzzified discrete hedging method in a drought scenario was found to be 0.68, which is substantially higher than the 0.52 from the discrete hedging method. Moreover, reduction of the maximum monthly shortage is another advantage of this rule. Fuzzy logic reduced 118 million cubic meters (MCM) of deficit in the Karun-3 reservoir alone. Moreover, as expected, the non-hedging SOP and WEAP model produced higher reliabilities, lower average storages, and less water losses through spills.

A Trade-Off Analysis of Adaptive and Non-Adaptive Future Optimized Rule Curves Based on Simulation Algorithm

This study aims to investigate the performance of Zarrineh Rud reservoir by implementing strategies for adaptation to climate change. Using sequent peak algorithm (SPA), the rule curve were simulated. Then, the optimal rule curve was procured through GA-SPA, aiming to minimize the water shortage. The future data were downscaled using SDSM based on CanEsm2 model and under RCP2.6 and RCP8.5. Finally, in view of environmental demand, reservoir performance indices were calculated for both non-adaptive and adaptive policies during all future periods (2020–2076). Results showed simulation with the static hedging rules managed to significantly reduce the average vulnerability index (by 60%) compared to no hedging, while the dynamic hedging rules outperformed static hedging rules only by 9%. Therefore, considering the insignificant improvement in reservoir performance using dynamic rules and their complexity, static hedging rules are recommended as the better option for adaptation during climate change.