Sedimentation is a serious problem in the operations of reservoirs. In Taiwan, the situation became worse after the Chi-Chi Earthquake recorded on 21 September 1999. The sediment trap efficiency in several regional reservoirs has been sharply increased, adversely affecting the operations on water supplies. According to the field record, the average annual sediment deposition observed in several regional reservoirs in Taiwan has been increased. For instance, the typhoon event recorded in 2008 at the Wushe Reservoir, Taiwan, produced a 3 m sediment deposit upstream of the dam. The remaining storage capacity in the Wushe Reservoir was reduced to 35.9% or a volume of 53.79 million m³ for flood water detention in 2010. It is urgent that research should be conducted to understand the sediment movement in the Wushe Reservoir. In this study, a scale physical model was built to reproduce the flood flow through the reservoir, investigate the long-term depositional pattern, and evaluate sediment trap efficiency. This allows us to estimate the residual life of the reservoir by proposing a modification of Brune’s method. It can be presented to predict the lifespan of Taiwan reservoirs due to higher applicability in both the physical model and the observed data.

Pluvial floods are the most frequent natural hazard impacting urban cities because of extreme rainfall intensity within short duration. Owing to the complex interaction between rainfall, drainage systems and overland flow, pluvial flood warning poses a challenge for many metropolises. Although physical-based flood inundation models could identify inundated locations, hydrodynamic modeling is limited in terms of computational costs and sophisticated calibration. Thus, herein, a quick pluvial flood warning system using rainfall thresholds for central Taipei is developed. A tabu search algorithm is implemented with hydrological-analysis-based initial boundary conditions to optimize rainfall thresholds. Furthermore, a cross test is adopted to evaluate the effect of each rainfall event on rainfall threshold optimization. Urban sewer flood is simulated via hydrodynamic modeling with calibration using crowdsourced data. The locations and time of occurrence of pluvial floods can be obtained to increase the quality of observed data that dominate the accuracy of pluvial flood warning when using rainfall thresholds. The optimization process is a tabu search based on flood reports and observed data for six flood-prone districts in central Taipei. The results show that optimum rainfall thresholds can be efficiently determined through tabu search and the accuracy of the issued flood warnings can be significantly improved.

Sediment deposition issues for reservoirs are important in Taiwan because the severe deposition could excessively decrease the reservoir lifecycle. Extreme storm events usually can carry a massive amount of sediment into reservoirs, and deposition will happen unless the incoming material can pass through sluice gates. When it comes with high concentration, the density current flow is prone to be generated, and the bottom outlets are the most effective sluice gate to release the sediment. In order to improve the sediment release efficiency, an accurate estimation of arriving concentration and time of the density current can be useful for the reservoir management. This study develops a two-stage approach which combines a numerical model (SRH2D) and the modified Rouse equation to predict the sediment flux of the reservoir. The numerical model was verified and applied to establish the relation between inflow and dam face concentration. The modified Rouse equation then adopted this relation to estimate the proper exponential parameter. As a result, the sediment flux amount at each bottom outlet can be accurately predicted by this equation. With this means, an early warning system can be established for reservoir operation, which can improve release efficiency during typhoons.