Overspill avalanching in a dense reservoir network

Abstract

Sustainability of communities, agriculture, and industry is strongly dependent on an effective storage and supply of water resources. In some regions the economic growth has led to a level of water demand which can only be accomplished through efficient reservoir networks. Such infrastructures are not always planned at larger scale but rather made by farmers according to their local needs of irrigation during droughts. Based on extensive data from the upper Jaguaribe basin, one of the world's largest system of reservoirs, located in the Brazilian semiarid northeast, we reveal that surprisingly it self-organizes into a scale-free network exhibiting also a power-law in the distribution of the lakes and avalanches of discharges. With a new self-organized-criticality-type model we manage to explain the novel critical exponents. Implementing a flow model we are able to reproduce the measured overspill evolution providing a tool for catastrophe mitigation and future planning.

References in corpus (3)

• Suppressing cascades of load in interdependent networks
• Sandpile on Scale-Free Networks
• Number theoretic example of scale-free topology inducing self-organized criticality

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Smart Rewiring for Network Robustness
• Flood avalanches in a semiarid basin with a dense reservoir network
• Controlling Self-Organizing Dynamics on Networks Using Models that Self-Organize
• Shock waves on complex networks
• The bounds of heavy-tailed return distributions in evolving complex networks
• A Bottom-Up Model of Self-Organized Criticality on Networks
• Distress propagation on production networks: Coarse-graining and modularity of linkages
• Controlling Cost in Sandpile Models Through Local Adjustment of Drive
• Usage leading to an abrupt collapse of connectivity