SCIENCE TALK: Storing and Managing Water for the Environment Is More Efficient Than Mimicking Natural Flows

Dams and reservoirs are often needed to provide environmental water and maintain suitable water temperatures for downstream ecosystems. In this talk, Professor Sara Null will examine whether water allocated to the environment, with storage to manage it, might allow environmental water to more reliably meet ecosystem objectives than a proportion of natural flow. Among other approaches, she will focus on using a priority-based water balance operations model and a reservoir temperature model to explore the pass-through of a portion of reservoir inflow versus allocating a portion of storage capacity and inflow for downstream flow and stream temperature objectives. She will justify that storage provides the ability to manage release timing to use water efficiently for environmental benefit, with the co-benefit of increasing reservoir storage to protect cold water at reservoir depth.
 

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Prof. Sarah Null
Lead, Environmental Water Management
UNU-INWEH