EPSCoR Research Fellows: NSF: Quantifying Impacts and Optimizing Benefits of Forecast-Informed Reservoir Operations in Nevada

In the western US, demands for water due to warming climate and population growth are increasing. Moreover, water stored as snowpack is decreasing and flood risks due to extreme winter storms are expected to increase. All these factors make it more difficult to balance management of reservoirs for multiple purposes that include maintaining water supplies, reducing flood risks, and meeting other cultural, social, and ecological resource management objectives.

Recent advances in weather forecasting are allowing the water research and management communities to better understand how water could be safely stored and released from reservoirs with greater flexibility in response to incoming storms. However, it is not well explored how this could affect ecological management objectives. This goal of this project is to fill this research gap by identifying and quantifying potential tradeoffs among managing water supplies, flood risks, and a broader set of ecological and societal costs and benefits.

Despite being the driest US state, the westernmost region of Nevada, where 21% of the population lives, is one of the most vulnerable to flooding due to atmospheric rivers (ARs). Balancing water supplies and flood risks, with cultural, social, and ecological management objectives in this region is particularly challenging but may be achievable using Forecast Informed Reservoir Operations (FIRO), a management strategy that enables greater flexibility to better balance these objectives.

The overall goal of this project is to develop new understanding of how FIRO can be used to improve ecosystem management while also meeting water supply, flood management, and other high priority objectives. This fellowship will provide the opportunity for an Associate Research Professor from the Desert Research Institute in Nevada and her student to address this by working with researchers at the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes (CW3E) at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who have broad expertise in AR forecasting, FIRO implementation, and assessment of social and economic impacts.

The project will involve bridging methods and workflows used to evaluate operational aspects of FIRO viability with approaches commonly used by the environmental flows research community to develop understanding of, and approaches for, improving ecological outcomes from current and future FIRO implementation. Outcomes from this work will include two peer-reviewed publications, new collaborations focused on addressing weather and streamflow forecast skill limitations that are inherent to watersheds on the eastern (leeward) side of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, and developing a transferrable framework to evaluate the ecological costs and benefits of FIRO in the Truckee River Basin.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.