Developing water supply reservoir operating rules for large-scale hydrological modelling

Reservoirs are ubiquitous water infrastructure, providing functional capability to manage, and often mitigate, hydrological variability across space and time. The presence and operation of a reservoir control the downstream flow regime, such that in many locations understanding reservoir operations is crucial to understanding the hydrological functioning of a catchment. Despite many advances in modelling reservoir operations, inclusion of reservoirs in large-scale hydrological modelling remains challenging, particularly when the number of reservoirs is large and data access is limited. Here we design a set of simple reservoir operating rules (with only two calibrated parameters) focused on simulating small water supply reservoirs across large scales with various types of open-access data (i.e. catchment attributes and flows at downstream gauges). We integrate our rules into a national-scale hydrological model of Great Britain and compare hydrological simulations with and without the new reservoir component. Our simple reservoir operating rules significantly increase model performance in reservoir-impacted catchments, particularly when the rules are calibrated individually at each downstream gauge. We also test the feasibility of using transfer functions (which transform reservoir and catchment attributes into operating rule parameters) to identify a nationally consistent calibration. This works well in ∼ 50 % of the catchments, while nuances in individual reservoir operations limit performance in others. We suggest that our approach should provide a lower benchmark for simulations in catchments containing water supply reservoirs and that more complex methods should only be considered where they outperform our simple approach.