This is a stupid question mostly because I don’t know where to ask it. Also it seems like an obvious thing but I’ve never read any news mentioning ……
I was just reading an article going over recent flooding catastrophes and one thing that stood out was a dam adding to the high water by having to release water while the flooding was still happening.
But can’t dam operators see a storm forecast and start drinking, er draining, ahead of time? It’s seems like you could make a big difference in controlling flooding with just a day or two pregaming. That can’t be profound, so why does it never seem to be mentioned? It could be a significant factor on many floods, a critical use for NWS data, forecasts, warnings, so where are the news mentions?
As others have mentioned they already do that to a degree they can with the uncertainty of forcast. It’s called Forcast Informed Reservoir Operation (FIRO).
Important thing is that the forecast is uncertain farther you go in future, and smaller the area you’re looking at. So the policies will have to take that into account, you can’t simply empty your reservoir because if your forcast is wrong and you don’t get enough rain, then you don’t have the precious water anymore for dry season. But if you’re wrong on the other side you get flood issue.
Satellite data and a lot of ground sensors are in place that help us better forcast the future storms along with improved computation and technology, but nothing is sure, and it might get worse with current situation. We already have problems because of previous funding cuts causing us to lose so many sensors.
Also a fun fact, we’ve had dams for so long that we don’t know the natural flows for so many rivers so we can’t calibrate our models well. Basically we built dams long before we started measuring the rivers. I’ve been meaning to publish this, but it’s just stuck in a draft for almost a year now :(
Thanks for lots of good detail I’ve never seen befire
Flood control is very close to my area of research. My research involves effect of dams on river water and I don’t get to talk about it often, so it was fun. But I haven’t actually worked on a dam control or made policies, so my work is more theoretical what ifs.