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Information - HS7 Low flow and drought estimation methods (co-listed in CL)
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Event Information |
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Accurate estimates of low flow and drought characteristics are needed for a range of purposes in water resources management and engineering including environmental flow requirements, water uses and discharges into streams, and hydropower operation. Low flow and drought estimation is an essential requirement for the implementation of National and European water law and policy, most notably the European Water Framework Directive. For sites where no long term stream flow records are available, regionalisation techniques can be used to infer the low flow and drought characteristics from other catchments where stream flow data have been collected.
There are four main objectives of this session, to put forward methods (i) to estimate low flow and drought characteristics from available stream flow records, (ii) to characterise the spatial and temporal variability of low flow and drought (iii) to predict low flow and drought characteristics at ungauged sites, and (iv) to quantify possible impacts of climate change on hydrological processes, estimation methods, water sectors and stream ecology.
Objective (i) addresses problems of temporal variability and adjustment of low flow and drought characteristics obtained from short records, non-stationary time series, seasonal aspects, zero values, and minor extreme values in extreme value analysis.
Objective (ii), as opposed to statistical regionalisation, focuses on understanding the spatial dynamics of low flows and droughts on an event basis, identifying the characteristic scale of low flows and droughts in a region and analyse the spatial variability encountered within a drought affected area.
Objective (iii) focuses on regional studies using statistical or physically-based catchment models, concepts that introduce process understanding in statistical regionalisation, methods that cope with the heterogeneity of large study areas (e.g. catchment grouping), and methods that combine local observations and regional information.
Objective (iv) rises the question whether time series and model predictions indicate substantial changes in drought frequency and severity and if and how concept and quantification of extremes, including drought, should be re-appraised. Hence, drought-related local to continental scale analyses of the past and GCM or RegCM simulations of the future, which aim to quantify impacts of climate change on low flow and drought characteristics and/or related processes, are welcome. This objective also intends to collect case studies that point out which processes or sectors are able to adapt to these shifts of drought climatology, and which ones claim for continuous correction of vulnerability criteria and action thresholds.
Overall, we particularly seek contributions on the identification of the main factors governing low flow and drought at different scales, papers on methods to include the impact of climate variability and land use change on low flow and drought, and papers that explore the uncertainty of low flow and drought estimation.
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