POTENTIAL UTILIZATION OF RESERVOIRS AS FLOOD MITIGATION INFRASTRUCTURE

The ability of reservoirs to retain a large amount of runoff during a storm event may allow them to be used as flood mitigation infrastructure. In this study, reservoirs in New Jersey are examined in order to determine if they can serve this purpose. Digital elevation models (DEM) are utilized to determine the watershed boundaries upstream of the reservoirs. Watershed land is categorized using data from the National Land Use Database and then combined with soil type and precipitation data (based on a 10-year storm event over 24 hours) to calculate the estimated runoff volume entering each reservoir using the curve number method. This estimate is compared to the volume of water a reservoir can retain based on the reservoir’s capacity. Data from a downstream gage of the reservoir is used to determine if the absorption of that volume of water by the reservoir will change the amount of flooding downstream. Finally, land use values in the watershed are altered to explore how the curve number may change with proposed flooding solutions.