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Assessing the impacts of reservoir operation to floodplain inundation by combining hydrological, reservoir management, and hydrodynamic models
Author(s) -
Mateo Cherry May,
Hanasaki Naota,
Komori Daisuke,
Tanaka Kenji,
Kiguchi Masashi,
Champathong Adisorn,
Sukhapunnaphan Thada,
Yamazaki Dai,
Oki Taikan
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
water resources research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.863
H-Index - 217
eISSN - 1944-7973
pISSN - 0043-1397
DOI - 10.1002/2013wr014845
Subject(s) - flood myth , floodplain , hydrology (agriculture) , flooding (psychology) , 100 year flood , environmental science , flood stage , structural basin , routing (electronic design automation) , flood forecasting , water level , hec hms , flood control , flood mitigation , drainage basin , geology , geotechnical engineering , geography , geomorphology , engineering , cartography , psychology , archaeology , psychotherapist , electronic engineering
A catastrophic flood event which caused massive economic losses occurred in Thailand, in 2011. Several studies have already been conducted to analyze the Thai floods, but none of them have assessed the impacts of reservoir operation on flood inundation. This study addresses this gap by combining physically based hydrological models to explicitly simulate the impacts of reservoir operation on flooding in the Chao Phraya River Basin, Thailand. H08, an integrated water resources model with a reservoir operation module, was combined with CaMa‐Flood, a river routing model with representation of flood dynamics. The combined H08‐CaMa model was applied to simulate and assess the historical and alternative reservoir operation rules in the two largest reservoirs in the basin. The combined H08‐CaMa model effectively simulated the 2011 flood: regulated flows at a major gauging station have high daily NSE‐coefficient of 92% as compared with observed discharge; spatiotemporal extent of simulated flood inundation match well with those of satellite observations. Simulation results show that through the operation of reservoirs in 2011, flood volume was reduced by 8.6 billion m 3 and both depth and area of flooding were reduced by 40% on the average. Nonetheless, simple modifications in reservoir operation proved to further reduce the flood volume by 2.4 million m 3 and the depth and area of flooding by 20% on the average. By modeling reservoir operation with a hydrodynamic model, a more realistic simulation of the 2011 Thai flood was made possible, and the potential of reducing flood inundation through improved reservoir management was quantified.