Zhenzhen MA

Dr. MA is a senior engineer of China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research. She works on river ecohydrological assessment, e-flow assessment, reservior ecological regulation, water resources allocation, planning and management.

Reservoir Optimal Operation For Sustaining River Natural Flow Regime: A Case Study For The Mainstream Of The Yellow River, China

Based on the natural flow pattern, an ecological scheduling model for the  main stream of the Yellow River is built. This is a multi-objective optimization model to minimize the weighted sum of the social economy water deficit outside the river and environmental flow deficit in the river. Random weight distribution technique is applied to find the optimal solution in this multi-objective problem. The result showed that the practice of reservoir operation considering nature river flow process is significantly helpful to meet the water demand of ecological system and maintain the nature ecological friendly flow regime in river basins. Under current conditions of water demand, the instream ecological water need can be largely met through application of ecological scheduling. In the future, if the water resources infrastructure and inter-basin water transfers remain unaltered, the water deficit of the social economy and the environment will rise dramatically, as the social-economic water demands increase. Implementation of water demand management, transferring water recourses from other basins, and building a new reservoir can all contribute to reducing the predicted future water deficit. The achievement of this research builds the ecological water use scheduling model for multi-reservoirs and analyses the ecological operation rules of the key reservoirs in the main stream of the Yellow River, which effectively provides beneficial references for the improvement of watershed water resources utilization theories and multi- reservoirs operating rules based on the concept of sustained development.

This abstract is submitted to the ARRN Special Session.