Overspill avalanching in a dense reservoir network

TL;DR

This paper studies the self-organized criticality of reservoir networks, revealing scale-free properties and avalanching behavior, and introduces a model to predict overspill events for better water resource management.

Contribution

It uncovers the scale-free and critical behavior of reservoir networks and develops a model to simulate overspill dynamics for improved planning.

Findings

Reservoir network exhibits scale-free structure and avalanching behavior.

The model reproduces overspill evolution and critical exponents.

Provides a tool for catastrophe mitigation and future water management planning.

Abstract

Sustainability of communities, agriculture, and industry is strongly dependent on an effective storage and supply of water resources. In some regions the economic growth has led to a level of water demand which can only be accomplished through efficient reservoir networks. Such infrastructures are not always planned at larger scale but rather made by farmers according to their local needs of irrigation during droughts. Based on extensive data from the upper Jaguaribe basin, one of the world's largest system of reservoirs, located in the Brazilian semiarid northeast, we reveal that surprisingly it self-organizes into a scale-free network exhibiting also a power-law in the distribution of the lakes and avalanches of discharges. With a new self-organized-criticality-type model we manage to explain the novel critical exponents. Implementing a flow model we are able to reproduce the measured overspill evolution providing a tool for catastrophe mitigation and future planning.