Forecast-Informed Reservoir Operations: An Agency Approach to Testing, Evaluating and Implementing New Water Management Policy

Abstract:

With the May 2016 update to Engineer Regulation 1110-2-240, which governs water control management throughout the agency, the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has been a key partner in a multi-agency, multi-disciplinary research and development effort called Forecast-Informed Reservoir Operations (FIRO) that has been exploring how research and observations can inform water management decisions at a series of pilot study locations. Finding operational improvements that simultaneously improve water supply, flood risk management and ecological benefits is a primary goal of FIRO. The FIRO effort at each study location is guided by a steering committee (SC) consisting of scientists, engineers and operators from research, regulatory and operational elements of the various federal, state and local agencies and stakeholder organizations relevant to the study location. Each SC develops a work plan to guide the assessment of FIRO viability through preliminary and full stages. The FIRO effort has completed its first full viability assessment at the initial pilot, Lake Mendocino in northern California, and is engaged in conducting viability assessments at three additional locations, each at various stages of completion. Through the process of site selection, steering committee formulation, work plan development and execution, transferability of FIRO principles has been tested and refined.

The FIRO viability assessment process has identified capability updates that are needed within the Corps Water Management System (CWMS), the enterprise-level system which integrates real-time data acquisition, database storage, watershed runoff forecasting, reservoir operations, river profile modeling, inundated area determination, consequence/damage analysis, and information dissemination to support water management decisions. Updates to the software tools within CWMS, which will enable FIRO evaluation and application at sites across the USACE, is underway.

This presentation will summarize the lessons learned to date in the testing, evaluation, implementation and transferability of FIRO at the various pilot study locations. Additionally, discussion of how these FIRO viability assessments will support permanent water control manual updates for the pilot study sites and beyond will be presented.