Publication Date:
2014-08-09
Description:
ABSTRACT A catastrophic flood event which caused massive economic losses occurred in Thailand, in 2011. Several studies have already been conducted to analyze the Thai floods but none of them have assessed the impacts of reservoir operation on flood inundation. This study addresses this gap by combining physically-based hydrological models to explicitly simulate the impacts of reservoir operation on flooding in the Chao Phraya River Basin, Thailand. H08, an integrated water resources model with a reservoir operation module, was combined with CaMa-Flood, a river routing model for the representation of flood dynamics. The combined H08-CaMa model was applied to simulate and assess the historical and alternative reservoir operation rules in the two largest reservoirs in the basin. The combined H08-CaMa model effectively simulated the 2011 flood: regulated flows at a major gauging station have high daily NSE-coefficient of 92% as compared with observed discharge; spatiotemporal extent of simulated flood inundation match well with those of satellite observations. Simulation results show that through the operation of reservoirs in 2011, flood volume was reduced by 8.6 billion m 3 and both flood depth and flood area were reduced by 40% on the average. Nonetheless, simple modifications in reservoir operation proved to further reduce the flood volume by 2.4 million m 3 and the flood depth and flood area by 20% on the average. A more realistic simulation of the 2011 Thai flood was made possible by modeling reservoir operation with a hydrodynamic model; the possibility of reducing flood inundation through improved reservoir management was quantified.
Print ISSN:
0043-1397
Electronic ISSN:
1944-7973
Topics:
Architecture, Civil Engineering, Surveying
,
Geography
