A procedure to develop elevation-area-capacity curves of reservoirs from depth sounding surveys

This paper proposes a procedure for developing reservoir elevation-area-storage capacity curves and bathymetric charts of a reservoir from depth sounding surveys. The Morii Reservoir, located in Bucharest (Romania), on Dambovita River, was chosen as case study. A single beam bathymeter with GPS was used in 2016 to survey the reservoir's bed. The acquired bathymetric data were denoised with a custom-made program written in Python, that uses the Butterworth filter and a zero-phase noise cancellation function. The decontaminated data were subsequently interpolated in ArcGIS to produce a gridded DEM of the reservoir bed surface and a bathymetric chart with contour lines. The area-capacity-elevation curves were obtained by calculating the 2D area and volume between horizontal planes and the interpolated bed surface. Comparisons with bathymetric survey from 2010 show differences of less than 14% in terms of storage capacity and 8% of the area of the reservoir during these 6 years.