Estimación del riesgo aguas abajo de una presa en función de las políticas de operación a largo plazo: caso de estudio presa El Cuchillo.

The common practice to assess the flooding risk downstream of a dam is to obtain design floods for different return periods and simulate their transit through the reservoir according to the operation rules of the spillway, assuming that those floods occur when the level in the reservoir is in the normal water level (NWL). This paper presents a methodology for assessing the flooding risk downstream of a dam considering that the level in the reservoir when the design flood is presented, is a random variable that depends on the long-term operation policy of the dam. For the application of the proposed methodology El Cuchillo Dam is used, located in Nuevo Leon state in Mexico, the methods used for estimating floods associated to different return periods and for defining the long-term operation policy of the dam are presented first; therefore, simulating the dam operation based in that policy, the probabilities associated with the reservoir level during flood period are deducted. When simulating flood routing associated to each return period, conditional probabilities associated with the maximum discharge flow are obtained, and finally the flooding risk downstream of the dam can be estimated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]