Accounting for Hydrologic and Land-Atmospheric Functions of Man-Made Reservoirs across Canadian Regions

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Manmade reservoirs are key to water resource management in Canada and throughout the world, and are used for multiple purposes, ranging from hydropower production to water supply, flood protection and recreation. Despite major socio-economic benefits, massive environmental changes are associated with reservoir operation. Most importantly, significant regulative effects are associated with reservoirs’ impoundment, which can severely perturb the streamflow regime and surface water storage in time and space. In addition, reservoirs alter the natural land cover to open water, and therefore, perturb the water and energy fluxes between the land and the atmosphere. This may further interact with local and regional climate, and lead to a new form of “anthropogenic climate change”, beyond the emission of Greenhouse Gases. Addressing the regulative and land-atmospheric effects of reservoirs requires representing their functions through generic mathematical algorithms and including them into the structure of large-scale models for impact assessment. Despite urgent need for improved quantitative understanding, current modeling and prediction capability is widely incomplete and is subject to large uncertainty. Most fundamentally, the land-atmospheric effects of reservoirs are wholly unaccounted. In addition, existing algorithms for representing the regulative effects of reservoirs have major limitations and result into considerable bias in simulating current and future effects of reservoirs. Such gaps necessitate major scientific developments towards improved representation of reservoir operation and their regulative and land-atmospheric effects at larger scales. This 5-years research program is proposed to put a major step towards improved assessment of current and future effects of reservoirs on water, energy and climate cycles. The short-term scope of this program is on developing improved models for assessing the regulative and land-atmospheric effects of Canadian reservoirs and has three objectives: (1) developing new algorithms for improved representation of regulative effects of reservoir operation; (2) developing coupled representations of regulative and land-atmospheric effects of reservoirs through the novel framework of Unified Reservoir Models, proposed in this program; and (3) assessing current and future effects of reservoir operation on local and basin-wide streamflow and land-atmospheric fluxes across a range of Canadian regions. Apart from providing a set of genetic modeling tools that can be used in other regions and globally, this program offers a first-hand understanding on current and future extents of hydrologic and land-atmospheric changes as a result of reservoir operation in Canada and can inform adaptation and mitigation efforts at local and catchment scales.