Reservoir Vulnerability in a Future Climate and Critical Hydrological Periods
Speaker(s)
Summary
We will present two recent developments carried out within the Watershed Hydrology team at INRAE (Antony, France), aimed at assessing the needs of water managers in terms of quantitative water resource management and the characterization of severe hydrological events.
First, we will present the working framework developed to assess the vulnerability of reservoir management in the face of climate change. The case study focuses on the four reservoir dams in the Seine River basin, whose main roles are to mitigate floods during the winter and to support river flows during dry periods. This work is based on the co-development of hypothetical but realistic scenarios combining future climate projections (results from the national EXPLORE2 project) and reservoir management rule scenarios, using a semi-distributed hydrological model that accounts for infrastructure operations and their downstream impact within the watershed.
Secondly, we will present a study conducted to identify and consistently characterize high-flow (flood) and low-flow (drought) periods, as well as the transitions between these types of periods, which are of interest to stakeholders involved in hydrological risk forecasting and prevention within a watershed. To this end, we use long-term discharge time series from over 600 watersheds in the CAMELS-FR database in France, along with an indicator based on baseflow and a mixed-threshold approach to identify periods when preselected quantiles are (not) exceeded.
These developments are supported by the European Horizon Europe projects STARS4Water and MeDEWsa.
Speaker
Maria-Helena Ramos is a researcher in hydrology and hydrometeorology and occasionally teaches at universities and engineering schools in Paris. She began her career in Brazil, where she earned a degree in Civil Engineering in 1993 and a Master’s in Environment and Water Resources in 1998. In 2002, she obtained a PhD in Atmospheric and Earth Sciences from the Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France. She then conducted research on hydrometeorological ensemble forecasting at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission in Italy before joining INRAE in 2007. Her research focuses on methods to improve flood and drought forecasting and to support decision-making in water resource management under current and future climate conditions. Co-chair of the HEPEX (Hydrological Ensemble Prediction Experiment) initiative from 2014 to 2018, she also served as President of the Hydrological Sciences Division of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) from 2019 to 2023. She is currently Co-Chair of the EGU Programme Committee and a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) World Weather Research Programme (WWRP).
