Abstract
This paper presents a system for supporting hydropower production on mountainous areas. The system couples the outputs of a numerical weather prediction model and a snow melting and accumulation temperature-based model. Several procedures are presented for interpolating meteorological variables and calibrating and validating model parameters that can be generalized to any other mountainous area where the estimation of current and forecasted snow water equivalent and melting amount is required. The system reliability has been assessed through the validation of three components: spatial interpolation of meteorological data, mathematical modeling, and quantitative meteorological forecast. The results show that good accuracy of meteorological data spatial interpolation can be achieved when the data from snow gauges are used for assessing the precipitation lapse rate at higher altitudes, and the temperature lapse rate is computed from data at each time step. The temperature-based hydrological model proved to be effective in simulating lake inflow water volume and energy production. No clear result has been found for snow melt forecast due to the difficulties in providing reliable quantitative weather forecast in complex alpine area.
Highlights
Since late XIX century, hydropower production is constantly increasing all around the world [1], with production being around 15% of all global electricity [2]
Climate change may modify this hydropower potential by greatly impacting the snow dynamics with shifts in the time of the melt water volumes, as well as the patterns and amount of rainfall [6,7]
An enhanced knowledge of the snow dynamics and their spatial variability is fundamental for monitoring and forecasting hydropower production, as well as for river flow hydrograph monitoring and the management of water resources in Alpine catchments
Summary
Since late XIX century, hydropower production is constantly increasing all around the world [1], with production being around 15% of all global electricity [2]. The combination of different upstream river catchments characteristics, mainly in terms of hydrology, climatology, and topography, influences the potential of hydropower production [3,4,5]. An enhanced knowledge of the snow dynamics and their spatial variability is fundamental for monitoring and forecasting hydropower production, as well as for river flow hydrograph monitoring and the management of water resources in Alpine catchments. Especially snowmelt modeling is still challenging, mainly due to the scarcity and accuracy of meteorological information at high elevations, for precipitation underestimation [12,13] and to the difficulties in monitoring and understanding the snow processes over complex surfaces and densely forested area [14,15]. Snowmelt simulation is usually based on temperature degree factors and energy balance models [16,17,18]
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