Water Storage in the Minnesota River Basin Additional Considerations for Water Storage Prioritization: Report 2B

Objective 2 Task B of Tetra Tech’s Minnesota River Basin Water Storage Project identifies and documents the availability of other sources of information that should be considered, in addition to peak and annual flow reduction, when determining priority areas for water storage practice installation and adoption.
This task report offers supplemental information to the results of Task A (Tetra Tech 2023), which used hydrologic considerations derived from existing Hydrologic Simulation Program-FORTRAN (HSPF; Bicknell et al. 2014) models to map the relative potential for reducing peak flows and annual flows to guide where water storage practices could be most effectively implemented in the Minnesota River Basin. Output from the HSPF models was used to develop maps across the entire basin to display prioritization at two scales – the Minnesota River Basin-wide scale and then within each eight-digit hydrologic unit code (HUC8). Prioritization scales were classified as high, moderately high, moderate, moderately low, and low priority areas based on the contributions of flows to the HUC8 outlet. This report offers guidance to local water resource managers on other factors, in addition to peak and annual flow-based priority mapping (Objective 2 Task A), to consider when prioritizing areas for water storage, along with information on where additional data sources can be found.