ABSTRACT:

Reservoirs play a critical role in regulating streamflow and water availability, yet their operations remain poorly represented in large-scale hydrological models due to limited access to long-term in-situ data and the complexity of real-world management practices. C+GDROM, a hybrid empirical–conceptual model for daily reservoir operation simulation, is developed to address these challenges by reducing data requirements while improving compatibility with hydrological models. To support C+GDROM applications, this dataset provides pre-calibrated parameters for implementing the C+GDROM across 1,758 reservoirs in the United States. For each reservoir, the dataset provides the parameters defining the conceptual storage regulation curve, which captures typical seasonal storage dynamics and serves as a key input for C+GDROM. In addition, we provide reservoir capacity features to ensure physically meaningful storage variations. This dataset is derived from the GDROM v2 reservoir dataset, with reservoirs selected based on data availability (≥5 years of records after 1990) and sufficient seasonal storage variability.

ABSTRACT:

Reservoir operations face persistent challenges due to increasing water demand, more frequent extreme events, and stricter environmental requirements. Historical operation records are crucial to investigating real-world reservoir operations, which integrate prescribed operation rules, empirical knowledge of operators, and regulatory response to extreme events. This dataset offers processed daily operation records—including inflow, outflow, and storage—for 256 major reservoirs across the Contiguous United States (CONUS) from 1990 to 2019. The reservoirs were selected from the dataset of Li et al. (2023), which includes 452 reservoirs, based on two criteria: (1) a minimum of 25 years of records (starting in 1990 and ending in 2014 or later), (2) less than 10% missing data during the study period. To enhance data quality, we remove the outliers of storage data with abnormal sudden storage changes even when inflows remain stable, and use linear interpolation to fill missing values, resulting in continuous daily records. Additionally, daily water surface elevation data are included for 217 of the 256 reservoirs. Related findings on changes in reservoir storage and operations are published in Chen and Cai (2025, Water Resources Research).