Climate Variability and Change—Hydrological Impacts (Proceedings of the Fifth FRIEND World Conference held at Havana, Cuba, No

Climate Variability and Change—Hydrological Impacts (Proceedings of the Fifth FRIEND World Conference held at Havana, Cuba, November 2006), IAHS Publ. 308, 2006, 26–30.

Operational management of hydrological extremes using global-scale atmospheric models

ARNOLD H. LOBBRECHT^1,2, SCHALK JAN VAN ANDEL¹ & FRANS VAN KRUININGEN³

1 Department of Hydroinformatics and Knowledge Management, UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education, PO Box 3015, 2601 DA Delft, The Netherlands

s.vanandel@unesco-ihe.org

2 HydroLogic BV, PO Box 2177, 3800 CD Amersfoort, The Netherlands

3 Hoogheemraadschap van Rijnland, PO Box 156, 2300 AD Leiden, The Netherlands

Abstract Many places on Earth face both droughts and floods. There is no argument about the desirability of preventing droughts and floods or at least mitigating the negative consequences of these hydrological extremes. Operational management of controlled water systems enables efficient use of water resources by considering system states and system requirements throughout the entire water system. Developments in meteorological products can be used more effectively in operational water management as is shown for a regional water system in The Netherlands. The case study applies early control actions to manage extreme precipitation events. It is shown that global-scale ensemble weather forecasts from the ECMWF can be used to decide on early control actions in medium-scale regional water systems. Economic pressure and scarcity of water, land, and time, demands that we use all available information to optimize operational water-system control.

Key words The Netherlands; water-system control; floods; weather forecast; EPS; precipitation; event analysis; storage basin; pumping strategy