H028-04
Estimating Impacts of Dam Development and Current Operating Policies in Poorly Gauged and Dammed Basins Using Satellite Observations and Modeling at Subcontinental Scale
Tuesday, 8 December 2020: 04:12
Virtual
Le Thuy Tien Du1, Hyongki Lee1, Du Duong Bui2, Berit Arheimer3, Justin Sheffield4, Son K. Do5, Hoa T.P Nguyen6 and Ngoc T. Nguyen7, (1)University of Houston, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Houston, TX, United States, (2)National Center for Water Resources Planning and Investigation, Hanoi, Vietnam, (3)Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, Norrköping, Sweden, (4)University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom, (5)University of Houston, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Houston, United States, (6)Department of water resources management, Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, Hanoi, Vietnam, (7)Incheon National University, Incheon, South Korea
Abstract:
Given rapid socio-economic growth in the Greater Mekong (GM) region, home to nearly 150 million people from 6 countries, since 2009, hundreds of more dams have been constructed to meet growing and competing water demands such as domestic water supply, food production, hydropower generation, disaster controls, and recreation. Nevertheless, six of the total 13 river basins in the GM are multi-national river basins, making access to existing available data, particularly reservoir data, extremely challenging. Furthermore, multi-reservoir operating policies were not developed until 2014 for domestic seven river basins in Vietnam to ensure dam safety and address competing water demands. This thus raises question how to quantify impacts of dam development and current existing/missing reservoir operating policies for poorly gauged and “geopolitically ungauged” dammed basins in this important region.
A recent novel approach of combining regionalization and satellite observations of various hydrological variables were developed to significantly improve prediction of streamflow signatures before extensive dam developments at both gauged and “geopolitically ungauged” basins (Du et al., 2020). In this study, first, we examined if growing satellite techniques and modelling can improve model skills in predicting regulated streamflow for both poorly gauged and “geopolitically ungauged” basins. Secondly, we estimated impacts of dam development and current existing/missing operating policies for these basins in terms of flow alteration and eco-flow metrics. It is expected that our modelling and satellite combination-based approach can help provide important implications for continuous international and domestic transboundary policy refinement towards sustainable water management.
