The effects of drought on reservoir operation in the Citarum river basin, Indonesia

A report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC, 20071] states that the world will be more vulnerable to drought in the next 25 years, and climate projections indicate that this will get worse in the future. An important component of a national drought strategy is a comprehensive drought monitoring system, which can give warnings at the beginning and end of a drought, determine its severity, and disseminate information to various sectors, especially agriculture, public water supply, energy, and health. Such a monitoring system needs a drought index, which is a variable for assessing the effect of a drought, and defining different drought parameters, to detect and evaluate the occurrence of droughts. This paper discusses the use of the water level in a dam and lake as an indicator of drought index to evaluate the drought, and the effect of drought on reservoir operations of the three cascade reservoirs Saguling, Cirata and Juanda, in the Citarum river basin, West Java, Indonesia.