Storage requirements for water in the United States

Abstract

Storage requirements for various levels of streamflow regulation in the 22 major regions of the contiguous United States are presented to supersede those given in Committee Print 32 of the Select Committee on National Water Resources, U. S. Senate. At high levels of development, the storage required to provide the desired flow in 95 and 98% of the years is substantially larger than that previously given. Carry‐over storage requirements based on probability routing of annual discharge are combined with seasonal storage requirements to give the revised storage requirements, which are then used to compute revised evaporation losses and revised cost estimates by the methods previously used. The maximum net flow that could be made available for the 22 regions for 98% of the years is shown to be 965 billion gallons per day (bgd) for which a storage capacity of 3.6 billion acre‐feet would be required. A net flow of 922 bgd could be made available with 2 billion acre‐feet of storage. Any increment of flow above the 922 bgd figure would have storage costs exceeding 10 cents per thousand gallons delivered.

Global streamflows – Part 1: Characteristics of annual streamflows

“…Over the past fifty or so years many papers and reports have dealt with this question in relation to annual streamflows - Yevdjevich (1963), Markovic (1965), Löf and Hardison (1966), Kalinin (1971), McMahon et al (1992), Vogel and Wilson (1996) and others. We do not plan to traverse details in this paper but suffice to say that for Europe and portions of North America the normal pdf is often adequate but the 2-parameter lognormal (LN2) and Gamma are more generally applicable.…”

Partial costs of global climate change adaptation for the supply of raw industrial and municipal water: a methodology and application

“…To estimate the costs of an additional unit of reservoir storage capacity, we used relationships between mean basin slope and cost per cubic metre for 11 size classes of reservoirs, based on Löf and Hardison (1966) and Wollman and Bonem (1971). The latter studies developed storage-cost relationships for 11 size classes and ten physiographic zones in the USA; we updated these to USD2005 values.…”

A Hydro-Economic Approach to Representing Water Resources Impacts in Integrated Assessment Models

“…A methodology is presented upon the past work of Löf and Hardison (1966) and Wollman and Bonem (1971) to use basin topography to estimate reservoir storage costs.…”