Overspill avalanching in a dense reservoir network

Area of Science:

• Hydrology and Water Resource Management
• Complex Systems Science
• Environmental Engineering

Background:

• Community, agricultural, and industrial sustainability rely on effective water storage and supply.
• Economic growth increases water demand, necessitating efficient reservoir networks, often built by farmers for local irrigation needs.
• The Brazilian semiarid northeast's upper Jaguaribe basin hosts one of the world's largest reservoir systems.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze the network structure and discharge dynamics of the upper Jaguaribe basin reservoir system.
• To develop a model explaining the observed self-organization and power-law distributions.
• To provide tools for water resource management, catastrophe mitigation, and future planning.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of extensive data from the upper Jaguaribe basin reservoir system.
• Development of a self-organized-criticality-type model to explain network behavior.
• Implementation of a flow model to simulate and reproduce overspill evolution.

Main Results:

• The reservoir system self-organizes into a scale-free network.
• A power-law distribution was observed in both lake distribution and discharge avalanches.
• The developed model successfully explains novel critical exponents and reproduces measured overspill dynamics.

Conclusions:

• The study demonstrates emergent, scale-free network properties in a large-scale, farmer-managed reservoir system.
• The findings offer a new model for understanding water resource dynamics in semiarid regions.
• The developed flow model serves as a valuable tool for water resource management and disaster risk reduction.