Climate Services for Water Resource Management in China: The Case Study of Danjiangkou Reservoir

The efficiencies and effectiveness of water resource management are inextricably linked to climate services. This study demonstrates a climate information service for Danjiangkou Reservoir, which is the largest artificial lake in Asia, facing mounting challenges for flood control, water storage, and water diversion. Unlike traditional water resource management on the basis of short-term weather forecast and runoff monitoring, subseasonal to seasonal (S2S) and annual climate predictions as well as long-term climate change projections were well used to support the decision makers in Danjiangkou Reservoir. The National Climate Center (NCC) has projected the changes of future climate and extreme events by dynamically downscaling the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5) projections to 25-km resolution for the long-term planning of water resource management in Danjiangkou Reservoir. Real-time climate predictions based on climate models and downscaling interpretation and application methods at different timescales were also provided to meet the specific needs of earlier predictions and spatial refinement for the short-term diversion of the reservoir. Our results show that such climate services facilitated the Diversion Center of Danjiangkou Reservoir (DCDR) to reasonably control the operational water level, increased the ecological water supply to the northern portion of China by 844 million m³, and reduced as much as 1.67 billion m³ of abandoned water in 2019. In the future, it is necessary to develop climate prediction methods to increase spatial and temporal resolutions and prediction skills, and enhance interactions between providers and users.