Alvaro Sordo-Ward

Alvaro Sordo-Ward
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid | UPM · Departamento de Ingeniería Civil: Hidraúlica, Energía y Medio Ambiente

Ph.D.

About

107
Publications
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2,341
Citations

Publications

Publications (107)
Article
Full-text available
We evaluated different management alternatives to enhance potential water availability for agriculture under climate change scenarios. The management goal involved maximizing potential water availability, understood as the maximum volume of water supplied at a certain point of the river network that satisfies a defined demand, and taking into accou...
Article
Full-text available
Water availability is of paramount importance for sustainable development and environmental planning, specifically in regions such as the Iberian Peninsula, renowned for diverse landscapes and varying climatic conditions. Due to climate change, understanding the potential impacts on water resources becomes essential for effective water management s...
Article
This study proposes an approach to evaluate the efficiency of low impact development (LID) in reducing urban runoff using a rainfall generator to disaggregate daily rainfall into sub‐hourly rainfall data, which are used as input of a hydrological model at the urban watershed scale. Twelve scenarios are analyzed combining four percentages of impervi...
Article
Full-text available
In recent decades, increased water demand combined with the effects of climate change has endangered water availability in many regions. In this context, sustainable water management has become a priority, seeking to balance human needs with the conservation of aquatic ecosystems. In the Duero basin (Spain), the availability of water is especially...
Conference Paper
Ensuring adequate water supply to meet social needs while maintaining good ecosystem status is becoming increasingly difficult. This task is particularly challenging in areas characterized by water scarcity and with unfavorable projections due to change climate, as is the case of Spain. The main objective of this study is to generate knowledge that...
Conference Paper
En este estudio se evaluó la capacidad de regulación de las presas en España peninsular bajo diferentes escenarios de cambio climático. La capacidad de regulación se determinó como la relación entre la disponibilidad de agua y la aportación media anual. La disponibilidad de agua se derivó del modelo WAAPA (Water Availabi-lity and Adaptation Policy...
Article
Full-text available
This study presents the first continental assessment of water storage and its influence on the availability of water of the river systems of South America. Although hydraulic infrastructure has the potential to cause several impacts on river systems and the environment, their relevance in water resources systems is irrefutable. The human services t...
Article
Full-text available
This study proposes a methodology that combines the advantages of the event-based and continuous models, for the derivation of the maximum flow and maximum hydrograph volume frequency curves, by combining a stochastic continuous weather generator (the advanced weather generator, abbreviated as AWE-GEN) with a fully distributed physically based hydr...
Article
Full-text available
The Muskingum method is one of the widely used methods for lumped flood routing in natural rivers. Calibration of its parameters remains an active challenge for the researchers. The task has been mostly addressed by using crisp numbers, but fuzzy seems a reasonable alternative to account for parameter uncertainty. In this work, a fuzzy Muskingum mo...
Conference Paper
We present a continental-scale evaluation of the distribution of dams and reservoirs in South America. This analysis is relevant to estimate potential impacts on water supply and flow alteration. A combined total of 808 of the largest dams across the continent, which can store about 1,003 cubic kilometres of water, were evaluated. We divided the ar...
Article
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The general perception of small run-of-river hydropower plants as renewable energy sources with little or no environmental impacts has led to a global proliferation of this hydropower technology. However, such hydropower schemes may alter the natural flow regime and impair the fluvial ecosystem at different trophic levels. This paper presents a glo...
Article
Full-text available
Hydrological design of Sustainable urban Drainage Systems (SuDS) is commonly achieved by estimating rainfall volumetric percentiles from daily rainfall series. Nevertheless, urban watersheds demand rainfall data at sub-hourly time step. Temporal disaggregation of daily rainfall records using stochastic methodologies can be applied to improve SuDS d...
Article
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Dams and their reservoirs generate major impacts on society and the environment. In general, its relevance relies on facilitating the management of water resources for anthropogenic purposes. However, dams could also generate many potential adverse impacts related to safety, ecology or biodiversity. These factors, as well as the additional effects...
Article
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Recent trends suggest that streamflow discharge is diminishing in many rivers of Southern Europe and that interannual variability is increasing. This threatens to aggravate water scarcity problems that periodically arise in this region, because both effects will deteriorate the performance of reservoirs, decreasing their reliable yield. Reservoir s...
Poster
Full-text available
The proliferation of Run-of-River (RoR) hydropower to fulfill pre-defined sustainability development goals and increasing demands for renewable energy may conflict with riverine ecosystem conservation objectives if environmental flows (e-flows) are not adequately set. Lack of a systematic methodology to define e-flows in RoR hydropower plants may c...
Article
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Flooding has become the most common environmental hazard, causing casualties and severe economic losses. Mathematical models are a useful tool for flood control, and current computational resources let us simulate flood events with two-dimensional (2D) approaches. An open question is whether bed erosion must be accounted for when it comes to simula...
Article
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This paper presents a real-time flood control model for dams with gate-controlled spillways that brings together the advantages of an optimization model based on mixed integer linear programming (MILP) and a case-based learning scheme using Bayesian Networks (BNets). A BNet model was designed to reproduce the causal relationship between inflows, ou...
Article
Full-text available
The water-energy-ecosystem nexus represents a complex interlinkage that depends on the flow regime type. Inadequate environmental flows setting may adversely affect the riverine ecosystem and/or hydropower revenue. This issue was addressed quantitatively in this study by considering a run-of-river hydropower plant located in a river of the Tagus ba...
Article
The 11th World Congress of the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) on Water Resources and Environment was held in Madrid, Spain, 24–29 June 2019, under the topic “Managing Water Resources for a Sustainable Future”. The aim of the 11th Congress was to discuss innovation pathways in water resources management to address current and future cha...
Article
Full-text available
The computational tool InSTHAn (indicators of short-term hydrological alteration) was developed to summarize data on sub-daily stream flows or water levels into manageable, comprehensive and ecologically meaningful metrics, and to qualify and quantify their deviation from unaltered states. The pronunciation of the acronym refers to the recording in...
Article
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Hydrogen sulfide (H 2 S) generated in sewer networks induces corrosion which today constitutes the main cause of deterioration of concrete pipes. Information regarding the H 2 S concentration inside sewer networks, as well as its control and reduction, has become one of the most important concerns in sanitation systems management nowadays. Modeling...
Book
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Este estudio, realizado entre septiembre de 2019 y mayo de 2020 por el equipo de la Fundación Agustín de Betancourt de la Escuela de Ingenieros de Caminos de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, presenta una colección de buenas prácticas en el análisis de los efectos del cambio climático, con énfasis especial en la modelación de extremos hidrológi...
Article
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Flow regulation affects bordering riparian plant communities worldwide, but how different plant life forms are affected by river regulation still needs further research. In northern Sweden, we selected 10 rivers ranging from free-flowing to low, moderately, and highly regulated ones. In 94 reaches across those rivers, we evaluated the relative abun...
Article
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The aim of this study is to contribute to solving conflicts that arise in the operation of multipurpose reservoirs when determining maximum conservation levels (MCLs). The specification of MCLs in reservoirs that are operated for water supply and flood control may imply a reduction in the volume of water supplied with a pre-defined reliability in t...
Article
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A method for determining the optimal Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDs) combination at the city scale is presented in this paper. A comprehensive set of SUDs categories comprising infrastructures aimed at either detaining and locally reusing or infiltrating precipitation are considered. A volumetric water balance is proposed for modelling hy...
Article
Full-text available
Hydropeaking, defined as frequent and rapid variation in flow in regulated rivers with hydropower plants over a short period of time, usually sub‐daily to weekly, alters hydraulic parameters such as water levels or flow velocity and exerts strong impacts on fluvial ecosystems. We evaluated the effects of hydropeaking on riverbank vegetation, specif...
Article
This study presents an analysis of possible policy measures to face water scarcity for agriculture in a long-term climate projection (2070–2100). Water availability was computed with the Water Availability and Adaptation Policy Analysis (WAAPA) model. WAAPA simulates water management in a basin at a monthly time scale, accounting for streamflow, re...
Article
Full-text available
This paper focuses on proposing the minimum number of storms necessary to derive the extreme flood hydrographs accurately through event-based modelling. To do so, we analyzed the results obtained by coupling a continuous stochastic weather generator (the Advanced WEather GENerator) with a continuous distributed physically-based hydrological model (...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Introduction Several studies reported that run-of-river (RoR) hydropower plants cause considerable alteration of natural flow regime in the diverted river reach, which may result in degradation of the habitat condition (Anderson et al. 2015). Usually, the environmental flow methods (EFMs) applied for environmental flow releases (e-flow) in case of...
Article
Full-text available
Increasing demand for renewable energy has led to a massive expansion of the small-scale hydropower plants and particularly those of run-of-river type. Meanwhile, the awareness concerning river conservation and restoration is being continually increasing. This study focuses on the assessment of environmental flows releases and energy production con...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper, we present a method to assess the influence of the initial reservoir level in hydrological dam safety and risk analysis. Traditionally, in professional practice, the procedures applied are basically deterministic. Several physical processes are defined deterministically, according to the criteria of the designer (usually in the conse...
Article
With the boom of hydropower industry, it has never been more important than now to re-assess approaches to a sustainable hydropower projects management. We evaluated the environmental and economic costs and benefits (namely environmental and economic effects) of implementing different hydrology-based environmental flow restrictions (i.e., environme...
Article
Full-text available
In Sustainable Urban Drainage systems, the correct characterisation of design stormwater loads has an important influence on their scaling. This article focuses on the method employed to determine the value of the percentiles used in the definition of the objectives to reduce the volumes of surface water run-off and improve the quality of the storm...
Article
Full-text available
This study presents a regional assessment of future blue water availability in Europe under different assumptions. The baseline period (1960 to 1999) is compared to the near future (2020 to 2059) and the long-term future (2060 to 2099). Blue water availability is estimated as the maximum amount of water supplied at a certain point of the river netw...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Hydrological dam safety assessment methods traditionally assume that the reservoir is full while it receives the design flood. In practice, reservoir management strategy determines the probability distribution of reservoir levels at the beginning of flood episodes. In this study, we present a method to economically assess the influence of reservoir...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Adequate design of energy dissipation structures is essential for effective flood control. The effect of aeration on water flow has been one of most analyzed phenomena during the last decades due to its influence on hydraulic structures. The purpose of this study is to characterize the influence of aeration on the boundary friction in supercritical...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The aims of this study are to quantify the effects of key properties of rainfall time series on the hydrologic design of sustainable urban drainage systems (SUDS) to test a method for their estimation from daily time series and to quantify their uncertainty. Several typologies of SUDS infrastructures are designed to achieve a target treatment capac...
Article
Full-text available
The aims of this study are to quantify the effects of key properties of rainfall time series on the hydrologic design of sustainable urban drainage systems (SUDS) to test a method for their estimation from daily time series and to quantify their uncertainty. Several typologies of SUDS infrastructures are designed to achieve a target treatment capac...
Article
Full-text available
El estudio presenta una metodología de carácter estocástico para la definición de Normas de Explotación optimizando tanto la explotación ordinaria como la seguridad hidrológica de la presa. Además, la metodología permite tener en cuenta la variabilidad del nivel inicial en el embalse en el momento de avenida. El caso de estudio es una presa bóveda...
Chapter
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In this chapter, we characterise droughts across La Plata Basin for the reference climate and future climate scenarios. La Plata Basin, located in the centre‐south of South America, stores one of the largest volumes of fresh water on the planet. However, droughts have significant impacts on agriculture, cattle rearing, water supply, natural water c...
Conference Paper
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We present the analysis of water availability under climate change in six representative basins of Southern Eu-rope: Duero-Douro, Ebro, Guadalquivir, Po, Maritsa-Evros and Struma. Water availability is computed with the Water Availability and Adaptation Policy Analysis (WAAPA) model. WAAPA performs the simulation of water management in the basin at...
Article
Full-text available
We identified and analysed droughts in the La Plata Basin (divided into seven sub-basins) for the current period (1961–2005) and estimated their expected evolution under future climate projections for the periods 2011–2040, 2041–2070, and 2071–2099. Future climate projections were analysed from results of the Eta Regional Climate Model (gri...
Article
Knowing the scarcity of water in the southeast of Spain and how the rain occurs, we considered the design of intake systems in ephemeral riverbeds in order to try to capture part of the runoff flow. The intake systems generally consist of a rack located in the bottom of a river channel, so that the water collected passes down the rack and leads to...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Run-of-River Hydropower plants are essential for the sustainable development of renewable energy resources. However, the increase in water demand for energy generation may conflict with the objectives of river conservation according to the Water Framework Directive (Pragana et al., 2017). • The main objective of this study is to improve the assessm...
Article
This study proposes a stochastic methodology to assess the influence of considering variable reservoir levels prior to the arrival of floods in hydrological dam safety; introducing probability associated to gate failure scenarios. The methodology was applied to the Riaño dam (northern Spain) by analyzing the effects of incoming floods with return p...
Poster
Flow regime determines physical habitat conditions and local biotic configuration. The development of environmental flow guidelines to support the river integrity is becoming a major concern in water resources management. In this study, we analysed two sites located in southern part of Portugal, respectively at Odelouca and Ocreza Rivers, character...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This study presents a methodology to estimate flood frequency curves for high return periods through stochastic rainfall simulation and rainfall-runoff modeling. The estimation of the flood frequency curve through simulation can be addressed through continuous or event-based hydrological modeling. Event-based models require shorter simulation times...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Flow regime determines physical habitat conditions and local biotic configuration. The development of environmental flow guidelines to support the river integrity is becoming a major concern in water resources management. In this study, we analysed two sites located in southern part of Portugal, respectively at Odelouca and Ocreza Rivers, character...
Article
A characterization of short-term changes in river flow is essential for understanding the ecological effects of hydropower plants, which operate by turning the turbines on or off to generate electricity following variations in the market demand (i.e., hydropeaking). The goal of our study was to develop an approach for characterizing the effects of...
Article
Full-text available
The study presents a method which can be used to define real-time operation rules for gated spillways (named the K-Method). The K-Method is defined to improve the performance of the Volumetric Evaluation Method (VEM), by adapting it to the particular conditions of the basin, the reservoir, or the spillway. The VEM was proposed by the Spanish engine...
Book
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This book is inspired by the positive feedback received by the Adaptation Inspiration Book developed in CIRCLE-2, coordinated by the Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon. This inspiration book is a culmination of four years extensive case study research carried out within the EU FP7 Project BASE: Bottom-up climate adaptation strategies towards...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The study develops a rule operation model for gated spillways which improves the performance of the volumetric evaluation method (MEV). MEV was proposed by Giron (1988) and is largely used in common practice in Spain. The improvement was made by applying a corrective factor to the outflow discharge proposed by MEV method. The choice of the correcti...
Article
Full-text available
This study focuses on the analysis of uncertainties in hydrologic series and their impact on water resources management decisions. The methodology is based on Monte Carlo simulation, where relevant parameters on the rainfall-runoff processes of a hydrologic model were sampled from suitable probability distributions in order to analyse the probabili...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
RESUMEN: En regiones con limitada información hidrológica, el conocimiento de los cambios en el patrón natural de las lluvias como consecuencia del Fenómeno El Niño (FEN) es de gran importancia para el diseño hidrológico, así como para la planificación y gestión de los recursos hídricos. El presente trabajo utiliza el análisis cluster para determin...
Article
Full-text available
This study addresses the question of how to select the minimum set of storms that should be simulated each year in order to estimate an accurate flood frequency curve for return periods ranging between 1 and 1000 years. The Manzanares basin (Spain) was used as a study case. A continuous 100,000-year hourly rainfall series was generated using the st...