The economic and societal impacts and benefits of managed water resources systems are substantial. Even though reservoir-based water resources management systems are a natural choice for the effective application of climate forecasts, in most cases there is no systematic use of forecasts in reservoir operations. It is advocated that this is a field where Climate Science, Hydrologic Science and Engineering, Water Resources Systems, Hydroinformatics, and Management Science can play an important role in facilitating the advancement of operational human-machine systems for reservoir management to allow the profitable use of the signal from uncertain multi-lead-time climate forecasts. Issues associated with this new area of research and technology transfer and lessons learned are discussed by way of an overview of pioneering studies undertaken in the US since the early 90's by the Hydrologic Research Center and the Georgia Water Resources Institute in collaboration with operational forecast and management agencies. A pertinent new initiative for Northern California, called INFORM, is also discussed.