In Norway, the typical competition over water is between environmental concerns and power production, and in urgent situations reservoir capacities might be allocated for flood protection, an asset to the society often over-looked. Internationally water use such as irrigation, drinking water supply, navigation and upstream reservoir developments also pose a risk to the power production.

As the water needs will vary throughout the year and will depend on the hydrological variability from year to year, tools that can assess the uncertainty of the availability of water as well as the demand are very much needed. As the planning and operation of reservoirs play a key role in water resources management, affecting the availability of water to all water users, a broad multi-disciplinary approach is needed.

This WP aims at adapting existing tools to be used for environmental design analysis and for the assessment of hydropower potential in complex river basins with multiple water user interests and targets, geographically distributed over the whole river basin affected by the regulation. Furthermore, tools will be configured in order analyse the effect of reservoirs in reducing flood risks and damages due to flooding.

More specifically the WP will include modelling activities, based on existing tools, for the purpose of:

• Supporting environment design analysis with more precise comprehensive and hydrological input

• Configuring hydrological/hydraulic tools in order to simulate the effect of reservoirs in reducing flood risks

• Develop a hydrological risk assessment tool based on Bayesian network methodology for the purpose of providing assessing the hydrological risk (as input to investment risk analysis) in river basins with competing water use

The modelling tools will be demonstrated in 3-5 case studies.