Monday, April 13, 2009

Assignment NINE

Shiau J.T., Wu F.C. (2006). Compromise Programming Methodology for Determining Instream Flow Under Multiobjective Water Allocation Criteria, Journal of the American Water Resource Association. 42(5), pp. 1179-1191.

Summary
In this article, the authors discuss their analysis of a weir on Kaoping Creek in Taiwan. The wier was built to serve municipal and agricultural, and currently operates under an operations function designed to meet demands while providing 9.5 cms for instream flow. Using their formulas for measuring hydraulic alteration, the authors found that the stream is nearly 70 percent hydraulically altered, a level which is potentially harmful for the aquatic species endemic to the stream. The authors then use compromise programing, similar to multiple-objective analysis, to evaluate the effects of providing different streamflows on alteration and of the municipal supply. The study resulted in contours representing a sort of pareto front.


Discussion
This seemed like an interesting paper. last semester in the seminar, Wendy from the TWDB talked about a similar program that was controlling reservoir release operations to improve downstream habitat and still meet reservoir requirements, similar to this paper.

I think that the TWDB study may be an extension of this paper, as the TWDB included the effects of stream flow variability on downstream alteration, as they found that variable flows are important for maintaining natural conditions downstream. Perhaps that would be too complicated to implement in a multiobjective analysis study like this one.

1 comment:

  1. Andrew, It would be interesting to know what were the parameters which they used to measure the improvement of downstream habitant. How was the operation scheme of variable stream flow optimized, would be another topic to explore.

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