A Hybrid Top-Down/bottom-Up Approach To Assess The Operational Flexibility of Multipurpose Multireservoir Systems Under Climate Change

manuscript submitted to Water Resources Research
1 A hybrid top-down/bottom-up approach to assess the

2 operational flexibility of multipurpose multireservoir
3 systems under climate change
4 Caio Sant’Anna 1 , Amaury Tilmant 2
5
1,2 Civil and Water Engineering Department, Laval University
6 Key Points:
7 • enter point 1 here
Corresponding author: C. Santanna, caiolucas.santanna@gmail.com
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10 Abstract
11 [ enter your Abstract here ]
12 Plain Language Summary

13 [ enter your Plain Language Summary here or delete this section]
14 1 Introduction
15 Many water resources systems have been designed based on the hydroclimatic con-
16 ditions that prevailed during much of the XXth century. As climate change will likely
17 affect the flow regime of watersheds, adapting the operation of those water resources sys-
18 tems is often a cheaper option compared to costly infrastructural upgrades. The re-operation
19 of the system might indeed keep the overall performance within acceptable limits, there-
20 fore avoiding, or substantially delaying, costly infrastructural investments.
21 Planning when and how to re-operate reservoir’s systems can benefit a lot from in-
22 formations derived from climate impact assessments. Those assessments, which are also
23 used across other water resources planning and management activities, initially attempted
24 to use a few number of hydroclimatic scenarios generated from regional or global climate
25 models, (Table 1). However, disposing of a small number of scenarios makes the assess-
26 ment prone to disregarding the most vulnerable and yet plausible future climates. So the
27 best practice is to have a larger number of scenarios fully exploring the performance space
28 over various uncertainties (Brown et al., 2019), and revising subjective probabilities in
29 function of improved understanding of mechanisms producing hydroclimatic changes.
30 This has motivated bottom-up approaches or climate stress tests. Here, the oper-
31 ation of the system is simulated over a large grid where each point represents a partic-
32 ular combination of relevant hydro-climatic variables (e.g. temperature, precipitation)
33 in order to identify performance thresholds. Several bottom-up approaches use hundreds
34 to thousands (Table 2) of synthetically-generated hydroclimatic scenarios in order to span
35 a wider range of climate scenarios. Most of the studies build synthetic hydroclimatic se-
36 ries by perturbing historical data to cover historic extreme events, GCM climate or pa-
37 leoclimatic data.
38 One important advantage of bottom-up approaches is its concern on previous ex-
39 periences of practioners (Rayner & Malone, 1998; Smit & Wandel, 2006). Indeed, look-
40 ing at past experiences allows the identification of previous challenging hydroclimatic
41 conditions and gives an idea about the adaptive capacity of the system, so as to provide
42 information on what to expect and how to adapt in the future. Although historic records
43 should be used as a valuable starting ground, it is important that it is not the only one,
44 since the result of unique global forcings might produce hydroclimatic states that have
45 not yet been experienced (Dessai & Hulme, 2004).
46 Here we describe a hybrid approach where the scenario-ensembles derived from cli-
47 mate models are used as scenario generators (Weaver et al., 2013) to build robustness
48 in water planning and management. It is made possible due to recent advances in cli-
49 matic sciences which have brought an improved understanding of relevant processes and
50 feedbacks governing Earth’s response to CO2 (Zelinka et al., 2020), and by considering
51 uncertainties related to downscaling, hydrological model and bias correction, which means
52 that hundreds of hydrological scenarios are generated.
53 This work also highlights the usefulness of the aggregation of scenarios into clus-
54 ters. First, it helps to analytically describe contrasting hydroclimatic states, which fa-
55 cilitates the construction of narratives concerning future climate and the comparison with
56 challenging conditions that have already been experienced by practitioners in the past.
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57 Besides, clustering is also a fundamental step needed to design a dynamic set of alter-
58 native operating policies allowing water managers to reoperate their systems as new hy-
59 droclimatic states unfold, instead of using a single static robust operating policy.
60 2 Background on Climate Change Impact Assessment
Table 1. Top-down approaches examples.
Study Description Explored Uncertainties

(Fortin et al., 2007) 6 hydrological scenarios to complete
(Brekke et al., 2009) 75 hydrological scenarios to complete
(Vicuna et al., 2010) 11 hydrological to complete
Table 2. Bottom-up approaches examples.
Study Description Explored Uncertainties

(Brown et al., 2012) 50,000 years of stochasti- to complete
cally generated hydrologi-
cal time series
(Prudhomme et al., 2010) 4200 temperature and to complete
precipitation scenarios
(Whateley & Brown, 2016) 900 hydrological scenarios to complete
61 3 Methodology
62 3.1 Exploration of Uncertainties
63 3.2 Clustering
64 3.3 Definition of Robust Portfolio
65 4 Case Study of Multiobjective Multireservoir system
66 4.1 Exploration of Uncertainties
67 4.2 Clustering
68 4.3 Definition of Robust Portfolio
69 5 Discussion
70 6 Conclusion
71 Acknowledgments
72 Enter acknowledgments, including your data availability statement, here.
73 References
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A Hybrid Top-Down/bottom-Up Approach To Assess The Operational Flexibility of Multipurpose Multireservoir Systems Under Climate Change

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manuscript submitted to Water Resources Research

1 A hybrid top-down/bottom-up approach to assess the

4 Caio Sant’Anna 1 , Amaury Tilmant 2

Corresponding author: C. Santanna, caiolucas.santanna@gmail.com

12 Plain Language Summary

60 2 Background on Climate Change Impact Assessment

Table 1. Top-down approaches examples.

Study Description Explored Uncertainties

Table 2. Bottom-up approaches examples.

Study Description Explored Uncertainties

76 under climate change. Water Resources Research, 45 (4), 1–16. doi:

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