Seasonal and Interannual Variability of the Krasnodar Reservoir Water Level Based on Satellite Altimetry Data

The Krasnodar Reservoir is the largest complex water management facility in the North Caucasus. The issue of its safe operation is the control of its normal retaining level and the level of dead volume. To study the reservoir level regime, we used data from the altimetry measurements of the Jason-1/-2/-3 satellites for 2002–2019, the processing of which was carried out according to the regional adaptive retracking algorithm. According to remote sensing data, the maximum seasonal water level anomaly of the Krasnodar Reservoir is observed in April (+1.54 ± 0.52 m), and the minimum is observed in November (−1.79 ± 0.64 m). The mean difference between the level gauge measurement and satellite altimetry data of the seasonal variability of the upstream and downstream Krasnodar Reservoir water level anomalies equals to 12.54 ± 6.95 cm. The calculation results show that the interannual variability of the Krasnodar Reservoir water level amounted to +1.03 ± 0.02 cm/year for the period from 2002 to 2019, which corresponds to the reservoir safe operation.