Assessment of hydraulic load acting on dams including filling variability and stochastic simulations

Standard practice in dam engineering is to consider only the maximum reservoir level governing the maximum hydraulic loading. This article presents a probability method for modelling reservoir level and the corresponding load on the dam. It uses multiple randomly-generated flood hydrographs to investigate the effect of reservoir level variability. The method was tried on three operational dams to assess its utility as an operational dam safety analysis method.