Optimal management of the Jucar River and Turia River basins under uncertain drought conditions

This paper presents a methodology to assess the best behavior achievable for a water resources system, and we apply it to the joint system of the Jucar River and Turia River basins in Spain. The resources of the two rivers are used jointly to meet the different water uses within the region, especially urban demands and environmental requirements. The climate change effects in this area are predicted to be particularly severe in this area with great variability in drought patterns. The results are particularly suitable for evaluating the best performance of the system under uncertain conditions

Economic risk assessment of drought impacts on irrigated agriculture

[EN] In this paper, we present an innovative framework for an economic risk analysis of drought impacts on irrigated agriculture. It consists on the integration of three components: stochastic time series modelling for prediction of inflows and future reservoir storages at the beginning of the irrigation season; statistical regression for the evaluation of water deliveries based on projected inflows and storages; and econometric modelling for economic assessment of the production value of agriculture based on irrigation water deliveries and crop prices. Therefore, the effect of the price volatility can be isolated from the losses due to water scarcity in the assessment of the drought impacts. Monte Carlo simulations are applied to generate probability functions of inflows, which are translated into probabilities of storages, deliveries, and finally, production value of agriculture. The framework also allows the assessment of the value of mitigation measures as reduction of economic losses during droughts. The approach was applied to the Jucar river basin, a complex system affected by multiannual severe droughts, with irrigated agriculture as the main consumptive demand. Probability distributions of deliveries and production value were obtained for each irrigation season. In the majority of the irrigation districts, drought causes a significant economic impact. The increase of crop prices can partially offset the losses from the reduction of production due to water scarcity in some districts. Emergency wells contribute to mitigating the droughts' impacts on the Jucar river system. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.This study has been supported by the IMPADAPT project (CGL2013-48424-C2-1-R) with Spanish MINECO (Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad) and European FEDER funds; the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the IMPREX project (GA 641.811) and the FP7 project ENHANCE (FP7, 308438).Lopez-Nicolas, A.; Pulido-Velazquez, M.; Macian-Sorribes, H. (2017). Economic risk assessment of drought impacts on irrigated agriculture. Journal of Hydrology. 550:580-589. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2017.05.004S58058955

Combined use of relative drought indices to analyze climate change impact on meteorological and hydrological droughts in a Mediterranean basin

[EN] Standardized drought indices have been traditionally used to identify and assess droughts because of their simplicity and flexibility to compare the departure from normal conditions across regions at different timescales. Nevertheless, the statistical foundation of these indices assumes stationarity for certain aspects of the climatic variables, which could no longer be valid under climate change. This contribution provides a framework to analyze the impact of climate change on meteorological and hydrological droughts, considering shifts in precipitation and temperature, adapted to a Mediterranean basin. For this purpose, droughts are characterized through a combination of relative standardized indices: Standardized Precipitation Index (rSPI), Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (rSPEI) and a Standardized Flow Index (rSFI). The uncertainty and the stationarity of the distribution parameters used to compute the drought indices are assessed by bootstrapping resampling techniques and overlapping coefficients. For the application of the approach to a semiarid Mediterranean basin (Jucar River Basin), the Thornthwaite scheme was modified to improve the representation of the intra-annual variation of the potential evapotranspiration and low flow simulation in hydrological modelling was improved for a better characterization of hydrological droughts. Results for the Jucar basin show a general increase in the intensity and magnitude of both meteorological and hydrological droughts under climate change scenarios, due to the combined effects of rainfall reduction and evapotranspiration increase. Although the indicators show similar values for the historical period, under climate change scenarios the rSPI could underestimate the severity of meteorological droughts by ignoring the role of temperature. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.This study has been supported by the IMPADAPT project (CGL2013-48424-C2-1-R) with Spanish MINECO (Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad) and European FEDER funds. Patricia Marcos-Garcia is also supported by a FPI grant from the PhD Training Program (BES-2014-070490) of the former MINECO. The authors thank AEMET (Spanish Meteorological Office) and University of Cantabria for the data provided for this work (dataset Spain02).Marcos-García, P.; Lopez-Nicolas, A.; Pulido-Velazquez, M. (2017). Combined use of relative drought indices to analyze climate change impact on meteorological and hydrological droughts in a Mediterranean basin. Journal of Hydrology. 554:292-305. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2017.09.028S29230555

Integrated methodological framework fos assesing the risk of failure in water supply incorporating drought forecast. Case study: Andean regulated river basin

[EN] Hydroclimatic drought conditions can affect the hydrological services offered by mountain river basins causing severe impacts on the population, becoming a challenge for water resource managers in Andean river basins. This study proposes an integrated methodological framework for assessing the risk of failure in water supply, incorporating probabilistic drought forecasts, which assists in making decisions regarding the satisfaction of consumptive, non-consumptive and environmental requirements under water scarcity conditions. Monte Carlo simulation was used to assess the risk of failure in multiple stochastic scenarios, which incorporate probabilistic forecasts of drought events based on a Markov chains (MC) model using a recently developed drought index (DI). This methodology was tested in the Machángara river basin located in the south of Ecuador. Results were grouped in integrated satisfaction indexes of the system (DSIG). They demonstrated that the incorporation of probabilistic drought forecasts could better target the projections of simulation scenarios, with a view of obtaining realistic situations instead of optimistic projections that would lead to riskier decisions. Moreover, they contribute to more effective results in order to propose multiple alternatives for prevention and/or mitigation under drought conditions.This study was part of the doctoral thesis of Aviles A. at the Technical University of Valencia. This research was funded by the University of Cuenca through its Research Department (DIUC) and the Municipal public enterprise of telecommunications, drinking water, sewage and sanitation of Cuenca (ETAPA) through the projects: BIdentificacion de los procesos hidrometeorologicos que desencadenan inundaciones en la ciudad de Cuenca usando un radar de precipitacion" and "Ciclos meteorologicos y evapotranspiracion a lo largo de una gradiente altitudinal del Parque Nacional Cajas". 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