Historical Dataset of Reservoir Operation over the Contiguous United States

Reservoirs are the key hydraulic infrastructure that regulates natural streamflow variability to fulfill various operation targets, including flood control, water supply, hydroelectricity generation and sustaining environmental flow. As an important anthropogenic interference in the hydrologic cycle, reservoir operation behavior remains challenging to be properly represented in hydrologic models, thus limiting the capability of predicting streamflow under the interactions between hydrologic variability and operational preferences. Data-driven models provide a promising approach to capture relationships embedded in historical records. This dataset contains historical daily operations of over 300 major reservoirs across the Contiguous United States with a wide range of streamflow conditions, including inflow, release, storage, elevation, etc. The eastern reservoir data is collected by Duke University (https://nicholasinstitute.duke.edu/reservoir-data/, Patterson et al., 2018. The western reservoir data is accessed via the United States Bureau of Reclamation (https://water.usbr.gov/api/web/app.php/api/).