A reservoir operational rule for irrigation in Japan

Operation of a reservoir for irrigation is more complicated and difficult than that for domestic water supply in Japan, owing to the fact that a requirement for irrigation takes various value depending upon effective rainfall on farmland, soil condition, and so on. Therefore, the reservoirs should be operated to correspond with demand, inflow, and unknown droughts occurring in the future. However, the reservoirs have been operated under operators' experiences without formal operational rules, because any effective theories or methods have been neither developed nor used in Japan at present.On operation of the reservoirs, there are two targets — promotion of effective release and restriction of release in preparation for droughts — conflicting with each other. It is useful to set up the operation with Required Storage for Drought Curve (RSDC) Method to achieve reasonable operation harmonizing those two targets. RSDC is composed with Target Line (TL) and Restrictive Release Lines (RRLs). TL is a target storage level to guarantee that storage will never empty until the end of the irrigation period under a certain probability. If actual storage remains above TL, effective release will be promoted. RRLs are storage levels pointing out the basis of restricting release. If actual storage falls below TL, release will be restrained in accordance with RRLs in order to get over uncertain droughts occurring in the future.In this paper, the theory of RSDC is described and the effectiveness of Rule Curve (RC) based on RSDC Method is illustrated by simulation on a single reservoir for irrigation.