Abstract

In a non-stationary and uncertain future it is relevant to think on new methodologies on the way we operate and design our water infrastructure especially in semi-arid and drought prone regions like de Limari basin. Several solutions of how to operate reservoirs system exist, but most of them consider constant expected inflows trough time. The reservoir system operation solution tries to find the optimal trade-off between allocating the maximum amount of water and storing or hedging enough for future droughts. The operation performance indexes such as reliability, resilience and vulnerability measure and compare one and another operation option, leading to the optimal one. The optimal solution requires the knowledge of the future inflows to hedge just enough to overcome the drought periods. Climate change alters this paradigm of reservoir operation, making it an even more complex and uncertain problem than it used to be for stationary hydrology. Solutions like fixed operational rule might deem useless under this level of non-stationary uncertainty. One possible solution is to develop a set of rules that constantly adapt to changing climate conditions. This flexible adaptive hedging operation that is tested in the semi-arid Limari context considers different possible risks and hedging options, which are evaluated by the performance indexes and compared against a standard and fixed operation.