Deterministic Simulation of Mildly Intermittent Hydrologic Records
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 22, Issue 8
Abstract
Application of a deterministic geometric approach for the simulation of mildly intermittent hydrologic data, exhibiting a few peaks and displaying relatively slowly rising and falling limbs and yielding slowly decaying autocorrelation functions that reach a zero value at a lag that is at least 5% of the length of the records, is presented. Specifically, adaptations of the original fractal-multifractal (FM) method and an extension, yielding more general attractors instead of fractal functions (and relying on five and eight parameters, respectively), are advanced in order to simulate (1) continuous rainfall events gathered every few seconds or minutes and lasting a few hours, and (2) continuous streamflow records measured at the daily scale and encompassing a year. It is shown, using as case studies one rainfall event in Boston, three storms gathered in Iowa City, and 4 years of streamflow records at the Sacramento River in California, all having distinct geometries, that the (computationally efficient) FM approach is capable of closely preserving either the complete record’s autocorrelation function or the data’s whole histogram (including moments), and even both, resulting in suitable rainfall and streamflow simulations, whose features and textures are similar to those of the observed data sets. The study hence establishes, for the first time, the possibility of parsimoniously simulating hydrologic sets in time in a deterministic manner, as a novel way to supplement stochastic frameworks.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to JASTRO Award Committee for providing research funds for Mahesh Maskey to carry out this research. The streamflow data used in this study were downloaded from the USGS web portal, and their service is also acknowledged. Bellie Sivakumar acknowledges the financial support from the Australian Research Council (ARC) through the Future Fellowship grant awarded to him (FT110100328).
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Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 22 • Issue 8 • August 2017
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©2017 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Oct 26, 2015
Accepted: Jan 30, 2017
Published online: Jun 9, 2017
Published in print: Aug 1, 2017
Discussion open until: Nov 9, 2017
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