ABSTRACT
To efficiently manage water resources in order to produce hydroelectricity without violating hydraulic constraints (navigation, water supply, dam safety ..• ) or to spill water unnecessarily, any hydroelectric power agency needs to know accurately the energy stored as water in their reservoirs. Hydrologists at Hydro-Quebec, the hydroelectric power agency of Quebec, Canada, have to manage large reservoirs. They have shown that daily errors associated with water level measurements led them to non optimal water management decisions that cause losses of many million dollars a year. To optimize the energy production and to limit the environmental strain, Hydro-Quebec has decided to add hydrometeorological stations to improve his knowledge about reservoir elevations, volumes and inflows, as well as weather conditions prevailing over these barren regions. To meet these objectives, special installations were designed for the harsh environmental conditions encountered in the vicinity of large reservoirs. The validated information provided by those new stations is taken into account to estimate with greater accuracy water levels and then volumes and inflows (calculated and forecasted}. Even if by this time we only have a few months of data, we can show that the reservoirs levels estimated with multi-sites limnimetric measurements are of much better quality.
