Overspill avalanching in a dense reservoir network
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF
AMERICA, 109 (19):
7191-7195 (2012)DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1200398109
Abstract
Sustainability of communities, agriculture, and industry is strongly
dependent on an effective storage and supply of water resources. In some
regions the economic growth has led to a level of water demand that can
only be accomplished through efficient reservoir networks. Such
infrastructures are not always planned at larger scale but rather made
by farmers according to their local needs of irrigation during droughts.
Based on extensive data from the upper Jaguaribe basin, one of the
world's largest system of reservoirs, located in the Brazilian semiarid
northeast, we reveal that surprisingly it self-organizes into a
scale-free network exhibiting also a power-law in the distribution of
the lakes and avalanches of discharges. With a new
self-organized-criticality-type model we manage to explain the novel
critical exponents. Implementing a flow model we are able to reproduce
the measured overspill evolution providing a tool for catastrophe
mitigation and future planning.