PNNL

Abstract

There are over 52,000 dams in the contiguous US ranging from 0.5 to 243 meters high that collectively hold 600,000 million cubic meters of water. These structures have dramatically affected the hydrology of every major watershed in the country. While there are national datasets that document dam attributes, there is no national dataset of reservoir operations. Here we present a dataset of historical reservoir inflows, outflows and changes in storage for 677 major reservoirs across the US. The reservoirs included in our dataset cover more than half of the total storage of large reservoirs in the US (defined as reservoirs with storage greater 0.1 km^3). We document the assembly process of this dataset as well as its contents. Historical operations are also compared to static reservoir attribute datasets for validation.