Toward Improved Simulations of Disruptive Reservoirs in Global Hydrological Modeling

Abstract

Accurate simulation of reservoirs has been a challenge for global hydrological models due to highly discontinuous water management and uncertainties in reservoir shape representation. In addition, at a global scale, it is crucial to consider those reservoirs that disrupt the downstream flow regime. We augment the mesoscale Hydrological Model with a newly developed lake module (LM) that incorporates an existing reservoir regulation scheme with non‐consumptive demand predictions from random forest. We also evaluate the sensitivity of reservoir shape on streamflow and evaporation for three shape approximations of varying complexities. We tested the LM across 31 non‐consumptive reservoirs covering an extensive range of hydroclimatic characteristics and demonstrate the applicability by using freely available global reservoir information. Streamflow simulations with reservoirs and model calibration show a median Kling‐Gupta Efficiency improvement of +0.94 (calibration) and +0.77 (validation) when compared against model simulations without reservoirs and default parameter set. We find reservoir evaporation highly sensitive to reservoir shape with half‐pyramid approximation consistently resulting in best fit at reservoirs with surveyed bathymetry. In contrast, the linear approximation (rectangular prism) produced a median bias of +114% relative to half‐pyramid, for estimating evaporation, across all the reservoirs. Streamflow simulations were insensitive to the reservoir shape. Our analysis shows that 30% of the non‐consumptive hydropower reservoirs of the GRanD data set are non‐disruptive and can be excluded without loss to model realism. Further work is necessary for testing the regulation approach in reservoirs with consumptive water usage.