Ice regime variation impacted by reservoir operation in the Ning-Meng reach of the Yellow River

Abstract

The Ning-Meng reach of the Yellow River in China is located in a high-latitude area, and river freezes up and breaks up every year, leading to ice flood and disaster. Since the 1990s, due to the rising winter temperatures, river channel shrinkage and impacts of reservoir operation, the river ice regime of the Ning-Meng reach has changed. This paper investigated reservoir operation effect on river ice regime by eliminating the impact of climatic conditions, and the test method could be applied to other rivers, where similar anthropogenic impacts can be suspected to affect the river ice regime. The results show that compared to the statistics when there were no reservoirs, the duration of ice freezing days reduced 8-33 days, and the ice cover thickness was 16-25 cm thinner than that without reservoirs. The average number of ice flood incidents per year decreased from 11.61 to 3.25, and the number of disasters reduced from 1.69 to 1.41. Moreover, the changes induced by reservoirs joint operation may vastly exceed that by single reservoir operation. The smaller is the distance to the upstream reservoir, the more obvious is the impact from the reservoir.

Naturalizing the freezeup regimes of regulated rivers and exploring implications to spring ice‐jam flooding

“…Potential IJF occurrences under natural flow conditions during 1972-2016 the studied period (1972-2016. A similar finding was reported byBeltaos and Peters (2020) for breakup flows.…”

Analyzing interactions between risk factors for ice disaster in Ning-Meng reach of Yellow River based on grey rough DEMATEL method

“…The Ning-Meng reach is the most significant warming area in Yellow River basin. The increase rate of temperature is about 0.5 °C/10 years in the recent 45 years (Liu et al 2012;Chang et al 2016). The large amplitude variation of temperature makes the ice cover much more thin and unstable, which leads to the alternate of freeze-up and break-up easily (Luo et al 2017).…”

“…The Reservoirs task is to adjust the changes of river flow based on the characteristics of ice regime. It affects the natural conditions of the river directly, which changes evolution of ice regime and the river morphology indirectly (Chang et al 2014;Chang et al 2016).…”

“…Yuan et al (2015) selected various ice disaster factors by the correlation analysis and built the ice regime intelligent coupling forecast model to forecast the ice flow date, freeze-up date and break-up date. Chang et al (2016) analyzed the factors of influencing ice regime from the aspects of temperature, river channel shrinkage and reservoir ice control operation, and investigated reservoir operation effect on river ice regime by eliminating the impact of climatic conditions. Some researches constructed index system of ice disaster risk and evaluated the ice disaster risk in Ning-Meng reach based on grey or fuzzy multi-attribute decision-making methods (Luo 2014;Luo et al 2017;Wu et al 2015;Wang 2017).…”

Modelling the effects of climate and flow regulation on ice‐affected backwater staging in a large northern river

“…Depending on hydrometeorological conditions, the initial ice cover may go through consolidation events that might result in significantly higher staging, posing serious flood risks (Andres, Vinne, Johnson, & Fonstad, ). Winter flows have been observed to increase 3‐fold to 4‐fold in some regulated rivers (Jasek, Alloisio, & Robinson, ), and regulation effects on ice‐jamming phenomenon and subsequent flooding have been reported in Canada (Beltaos, Boyle, & Hryciw, ), Romania (Rădoane, Ciaglic, & Rădoane, ), China (Chang, Wang, Li, & Wang, ) and elsewhere (e.g., Pawłowski, ; Takács, Kern, & Nagy, ; Timalsina, Charmasson, & Alfredsen, ).…”