Identification

Title

Reservoir regulation affects droughts and floods at local and regional scales

Abstract

Hydrological extremes can be particularly impactful in catchments with high human presence where they are modulated by human intervention such as reservoir regulation. Still, we know little about how reservoir operation affects droughts and floods, particularly at a regional scale. Here, I present a large data set of natural and regulated catchment pairs in the United States and assess how reservoir regulation affects local and regional drought and flood characteristics. My results show that (1) reservoir regulation affects drought and flood hazard at a local scale by reducing severity (i.e. intensity/magnitude and deficit/volume) but increasing duration; (2) regulation affects regional hazard by reducing spatial flood connectedness (i.e. number of catchments a catchment co-experiences flood events with) in winter and by increasing spatial drought connectedness in summer; (3) the local alleviation effect is only weakly affected by reservoir purpose for both droughts and floods. I conclude that both local and regional flood and drought characteristics are substantially modulated by reservoir regulation, an aspect that should neither be neglected in hazard nor climate impact assessments.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d77s7s80

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2021-12-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact