Cyclic Storage: A Preliminary Assessment

The performance of a simplified water resource system consisting of a single surface reservoir and adjacent aquifer storage operated as a coupled flow buffering device is investigated on an annual scale to provide insight into the most important physical and climatic (streamflow) parameters governing cyclic storage performance. The hypo thetical system is fully characterized by aquifer capacity, pumping and recharge capacity, surface storage size, annual demand, and reservoir inflow statistics, including annual mean, coefficient of variation, skew coefficient, lag one correlation coefficient, and Hurst coefficient. System performance under a range of these parameters is reviewed via Monte Carlo simulation; for the cases considered system performance is almost always limited by total system storage (sum of surface and aquifer storage). A preliminary economic analysis indicates that the cost of providing flow buffering via development of subsurface storage is about an order of magnitude less than for surface storage in the cases considered.