Hydroclimatic Effects of a Hydropower Reservoir in a Tropical Hydrological Basin

David Zamora, Erasmo Rodríguez and Fernando Jaramillo
Additional contact information
David Zamora: Civil and Agricultural Engineering Department, Water Resources Research Group (GIREH), Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá 111321, Colombia
Erasmo Rodríguez: Civil and Agricultural Engineering Department, Water Resources Research Group (GIREH), Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá 111321, Colombia
Fernando Jaramillo: Department of Physical Geography, Stockholm University, 10691 Stockholm, Sweden

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 17, 1-19

Abstract: The consequent change in land cover from vegetation to water surface after inundation is the most obvious impact attributed to the impoundment of reservoirs and dam construction. However, river regulation also alters the magnitude and variability of water and energy fluxes and local climatic parameters. Studies in Mediterranean, temperate and boreal hydrological basins, and even a global-scale study, have found a simultaneous decrease in the variation of runoff and increase in the mean evaporative ratio after impoundment. The aim here is to study the existence of these effects on a regulated tropical basin in Colombia with long-term data, as such studies in tropical regions are scarce. As expected, we observed a decrease in the long-term coefficient of variation of runoff of 33% that can be attributed to the impoundment of the reservoir. However, we did not find important changes in precipitation or the expected increasing evaporative ratio-effect from the impoundment of the reservoir, founding for the latter rather a decrease. This may be due to the humid conditions of the region where actual evapotranspiration is already close to its potential or to other land cover changes that decrease evapotranspiration during the studied period. Our study shows that the effects from impounded reservoirs in tropical regulated basins may differ from those found in other climatic regions.

Keywords: evapotranspiration; hydroclimatic changes; precipitation-runoff variability; reservoir (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/17/6795/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/17/6795/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:17:p:6795-:d:402206

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().