ABSTRACT
In 2000, the Italian Dam Authority issued a procedure to regulate the measures that should be carried out during each significant flood event, with the aim of obtaining a hydrological database of annual maximum flows.
After 15 years of applying this procedure, the Italian Dam Authority revised it in 2018 and required dam owners to reconstruct the most significant hydrological event of the year and the most significant events of the previous five-year period. They also provided further technical indications to improve and optimize the procedure. However, the experience gained in the last three years has shown that the reconstruction of hydrological events was affected by errors due to tolerance in reservoir level measurements, uncertainties in the measurement of flow rates, and discharge curves that were not always adequately calibrated.
With the aim, shared by the operators and the authority, to increase the database of the maximum annual flows with values that are “reliable hydrological data”, ITCOLD constituted the Working Group on the reconstruction of the maximum annual hydrographs. In March 2023 the group published the final report, providing more detailed technical indications for the reconstruction of hydrographs of the maximum annual flood event and defining shared criteria for the identification of cases of exemption from this obligation.
