Historical Operation Data of 256 Reservoirs in Contiguous United States

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).水库调度长期面临多重挑战，包括日益增长的用水需求、愈发频发的极端水文事件，以及愈发严格的环境监管要求。历史调度记录对于探究真实场景下的水库调度实践至关重要，因为实际调度工作融合了既定调度规则、调度人员的实践经验，以及针对极端事件的应急响应措施。本数据集提供了经过预处理的日度调度记录，涵盖1990年至2019年间美国本土（Contiguous United States, CONUS）256座大型水库的入库流量、出库流量与水库蓄水量。该数据集的水库样本选自Li等人2023年发布的包含452座水库的原始数据集，筛选依据为两项标准：其一，至少拥有25年的有效观测记录（起始年份为1990年，结束年份不早于2014年）；其二，研究时段内数据缺失率低于10%。为提升数据质量，研究团队剔除了入库流量保持稳定但蓄水量出现异常突变的离群值，并通过线性插值法填补缺失值，最终得到连续完整的日度数据集。此外，256座样本水库中的217座还附带了日度水面高程观测数据。有关水库蓄水量变化与调度模式演变的相关研究成果，已发表于Chen与Cai（2025）刊载于《Water Resources Research》的论文中。