Assessment of Folsom Lake response to historical and potential future climate scenarios 2. Reservoir management

An integrated forecast-decision system for Folsom Lak, (California) is deve loped and used to assess the sensitivity of reservoir performance to variou s forecast-management schemes under historical and future climate scenarios . The assessments are based on various combinations of inflow forecasting m odels, decision rules, and climate scenarios. The inflow forecasting option s include operational forecasts, historical analog ensemble forecasts, hydr ologic ensemble forecasts, GCM-conditioned hydrologic ensemble forecasts, a nd perfect forecasts. Reservoir management is based on either heuristic rul e curves or a decision system which includes three coupled models pertinent to turbine load dispatching, short-range energy generation scheduling, and long/mid-range reservoir management. The climate scenarios are based on hi storical inflow realizations, potential inflow realizations generated by Ge neral Circulation Models assuming no CO2 increase, and potential inflow rea lizations assuming 1% CO, annual increase. The study demonstrates that (1) reliable inflow forecasts and adaptive decision systems can substantially b enefit reservoir performance and (2) dynamic operational procedures can be effective climate change coping strategies. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.