Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Beyond Peak Reservoir Storage? A Global Estimate Of Declining Water Storage Capacity In Large Reservoirs, Dominik Wisser, Steve Frolking, Stephen Hagen, Marc F. P. Bierkens

Earth Sciences

Water storage is an important way to cope with temporal variation in water supply and demand. The storage capacity and the lifetime of water storage reservoirs can be significantly reduced by the inflow of sediments. A global, spatially explicit assessment of reservoir storage loss in conjunction with vulnerability to storage loss has not been done. We estimated the loss in reservoir capacity for a global data set of large reservoirs from 1901 to 2010, using modeled sediment flux data. We use spatially explicit population data sets as a proxy for storage demand and calculate storage capacity for all river basins …