Application of Seasonal Forecast Climate Data For Reservoir Outflows in The Douro Basin, in Portugal.

Climate and meteorological conditions have a significant impact on energy demand. The project CLIM2POWER aims at developing a climate service (CS) including state-of-the art seasonal climate forecasts into the planning of the operation of the power production systems. This work presents part of the project, addressed at forecasting the production capacity of 13 hydropower plants in the Douro river basin. The seasonal (six months) climate data used in this project is produced by the German Climate Forecast System (GCFS 2.0), on a daily scale. Rainfall-runoff modelling using HEC-HMS was done on daily scale for Portuguese territory. For Spanish territory, flow scenarios were created based on observed data. Results show that outflows from Portuguese territory are highly dependent on the inflows from Spanish part of the basin but also that climate seasonal forecasting could be an added value for the management of hydropower production, although improvements are still required mainly on the climate forecast as results are yet subject to significant uncertainty. Ongoing work is focused on the identification and development of strategies for hydropower dam operation on the basis of seasonal climate forecast using
hydrological modeling.