Salinas Valley Operational Model: Input Operational Data (ver. 2.0, September 2023)

This digital dataset contains the surface water operational data used for the Salinas Valley Operational Model (SVOM) including the timeseries data and the operational rules. While much of the input data is shared between the Salinas Valley Operational Model (SVOM) and the Salinas Valley Integrated Hydrologic Model (SVIHM), the SVOM has additional input data specific to the purpose and function of the model. The SVOM is a hypothetical baseline model developed to examine the benefit of different reservoir operations to the availability of water resources for the San Antonio and Nacimiento Reservoirs. The San Antonio and Nacimiento reservoirs are used for regional water supply and management of Salinas River flows to support conservation, fish passage, and support downstream diversions for the Salinas Valley Watershed Model (SVWM). By using the SVOM, Monterey County can evaluate reservoir management projects and practices to help make decisions that optimize the use of available groundwater resources and develop habitat conservation plans to sustain threatened salmon populations. To improve flood protection and increase storage capacity, Monterey County is considering a 11,000-foot gravity-flow interlake tunnel connecting the Nacimiento and San Antonio reservoirs. The tunnel would allow the excess water from winter storm events to be captured and transferred into the San Antonio Reservoir, increasing storage capacity by 18%. The interlake tunnel would also require the spillway elevation to be raised as the San Antonio Reservoir dam to accommodate the additional water. The SVOM will be used to evaluate the feasibility and benefits of different tunnel and operation configurations in support of environmental and engineering design needs. While this data release includes some of the files necessary to set up the interlake tunnel scenario, the SVOM does not include the implementation or analysis for the interlake tunnel. The reservoir releases are dynamically simulated based on the defined operational rules, instead of a timeseries of historical releases like in SVIHM, using the surface water operations framework from MODFLOW-OHWM (Hanson and others, 2014; Boyce and others, 2020). The operation rules are based on current reservoir operation rules and legal constraints, allowing for the reservoir’s release into the stream network to be simulated internally to account for changes in reservoir storage and reservoir releases for conservation, demands, and flood management. Each rule is a set of logic statements that determine if reservoir releases are triggered. The timeseries data and supporting datasets included are required to carry out the logic in each of the rules.