ENSO State-Based Climate-Informed Reservoir Operation (CIRO) in the Trinity River Basin in Texas

Abstract Submission: Forecast-Informed Reservoir Operation (FIRO) policies have benefited from the evolution of skill of weather forecast to alleviate risks of floods and droughts over short to medium term hydrologic variability (days up to seasonal). Yet, the hydrologic variability over a longer term, corresponding to inter-annual variability, remains a challenging task when the accuracy of weather forecast is relied on. The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) state, as a major driver of global hydro-climatic variability, with its evident effects on floods, droughts, and coupled human-natural systems, represents a useful piece of information when establishing reservoir operating policies. A correlation analysis has been performed to assess the linkage of the seasonal-annual streamflow anomaly to the ENSO state using a case study within the Trinity River Basin in Texas. Following that, ongoing work explores the utilization of the ENSO state as an input to Climate Informed Reservoirs Operation (CIRO) approach in which the ENSO state and reservoir variable thresholds that trigger decisions including flood control and hedging actions, are utilized to search for reservoir operation policies through a decision tree algorithm. The approach explores whether or not incorporating ENSO information to determine an adaptive water management policy would lead to a better performance than the existing operation policies.

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