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Hydrodynamic modeling of flood retention reservoirs is a very effective tool to evaluate reservoir performance, to plan modifications, and to design new reservoirs. The 1-D Saint Venant equations are suitable to simulate the standing waves and other degenerations that occur in the reservoirs. The accuracy of these simulations depends on the Courant numbers used in the simulations. Consequently, the use of an appropriate time step for a specific grid size is crucial for the accuracy of the solution. A series of numerical experiments were performed and compared to observe data to develop time step criteria for solving the 1-D Saint Venant equations using the Abbott-Ionescu scheme. The time step was normalized by the wave celerity to make it problem dependent. The new time step criteria was evaluated on a different reservoir and proved to be adequate for selecting a time step for reservoir modeling. The criteria could be readily integrated in existing models to be used in an adaptive time stepping scheme.