Skip to main content
Dryad

Sacramento River RAFT water temperature model simulations based on hypothetical reservoir perturbations in the historical record

Data files

Apr 23, 2023 version files 101.27 MB

Abstract

We used a process-based water temperature model (RAFT, Pike et al., 2013) to estimate the ability of reservoir discharge to mediate river temperature heating processes impacting downstream locations (i.e., discharge-mediated temperature management) on California's Sacramento River. This was done by modeling water temperatures over the historical record (1990-2020) of model forcings and only perturbing reservoir discharge levels on a daily time step, ranging from 3000 to 15000 cubic feet per second as simulated at the Sacramento River at Wilkins Slough USGS gauging station (https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/11390500).

Pike, A., E. Danner, D. Boughton, F. Melton, R. Nemani, B. Rajagopalan, and S. Lindley. 2013. Forecasting river temperatures in real time using a stochastic dynamics approach. Water Resources Research 49:5168-5182.