title: Overspill avalanching in a dense reservoir network.
abstract: Sustainability of communities, agriculture, and industry is strongly dependent on an effective storage and supply of water resources. In some regions the economic growth has led to a level of water demand that can only be accomplished through efficient reservoir networks. Such infrastructures are not always planned at larger scale but rather made by farmers according to their local needs of irrigation during droughts. Based on extensive data from the upper Jaguaribe basin, one of the world's largest system of reservoirs, located in the Brazilian semiarid northeast, we reveal that surprisingly it self-organizes into a scale-free network exhibiting also a power-law in the distribution of the lakes and avalanches of discharges. With a new self-organized-criticality-type model we manage to explain the novel critical exponents. Implementing a flow model we are able to reproduce the measured overspill evolution providing a tool for catastrophe mitigation and future planning.
authors.affiliation: University of the International Integration of the African-Brazilian Portuguese Speaking Countries-UNILAB, Campus do Pici, 60455-760 Fortaleza, Brazil.
authors.forename: George L
authors.initials: GL
authors.lastname: Mamede
authors.forename: Nuno A M
authors.initials: NA
authors.lastname: Araújo
authors.forename: Christian M
authors.initials: CM
authors.lastname: Schneider
authors.forename: José Carlos
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: de Araújo
authors.forename: Hans J
authors.initials: HJ
authors.lastname: Herrmann
mesh_terms: D000383:Agriculture; D000465:Algorithms; D055875:Avalanches; D001938:Brazil; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources / Q000379:methods / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D004784:Environmental Monitoring / Q000379:methods / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D005843:Geography; D007221:Industry; D060106:Lakes; D045483:Rivers; D013269:Stochastic Processes; D014867:Water / Q000378:metabolism*; D014872:Water Movements; D014881:Water Supply / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*
chemical_list: D014867:Water