Australian dams and reservoirs within a global setting

ABSTRACT

There has been a resurgence of interest in the construction of large dams worldwide. This study examined many dams from around the world (>10,000) and compared them to a comprehensive dataset developed for Australia (224) to provide insights that might otherwise not be apparent from examining just one or several dams. The dam datasets (ICOLD and ANCOLD) largely confirm existing narratives on Australian dam construction. Compared to dams from Rest of the World (RoW), Australian dams were found to:

• have larger reservoir capacities and spillway capacities for a given catchment area;

• have higher dam walls for a given capacity; and

• result in higher degrees of river regulation.

A range of general relationships among reservoir capacities, reservoir surface areas, and catchment areas are presented which can be used in reconnaissance or pre-feasibility studies and for global hydrologic modelling when dam and reservoir information are required as input.

KEYWORDS:

• Water resources
• ICOLD
• ANCOLD

Acknowledgments

We are especially grateful to Graeme Bell and Rory Nathan who straightened us out on several key issues. We would like to acknowledge ANCOLD and ICOLD for their efforts in maintaining registers of large dams in Australia and globally, respectively. We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers, who provided helpful advice in an earlier manuscript, and to the Editor and two other reviewers for their comments regarding the manuscript which formed the basis of this paper.

Additional information

Funding

No funding was received for this work.

Notes on contributors

T. A. McMahon

T. A. McMahon has contributed extensively to understanding Australia’s surface hydrology and water resources. During his career he has published 7 books and manuals and more than 550 book chapters, scientific papers, reports and articles on hydrology and water resources engineering. One of his many career highlights was introduction of reservoir storage-yield-reliability procedures to the Australian water engineering profession in the early 1970s. In recent years he has been involved in research into large-scale atmospheric drivers for hydrologic variability, the estimation of evaporation from standard meteorological data, and uncertainty in future streamflow estimates based on climate models.

C. Petheram

C. Petheram is a hydrologist and principal research scientist at CSIRO, Australia. He has a BEng from the University of Melbourne and a PhD inhydrology with the CRC for Catchment Hydrology and University of Melbourne. Since joining CSIRO in 2004 Cuan has worked on many large water and agricultural resource assessment projects across northern Australia. Most recently he was the lead author on the Northern Rivers and Dams report (2014), an appendix to the Northern Australia White Paper (PMC 2015) and he was the joint project manager of the Northern Australia Water Resource Assessment (2016–2018) and the Flinders and Gilbert Agriculture Resource Assessment (2012–13).