Hurst Analysis of Hydrologic and Water Quality Time Series
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 16, Issue 9
Abstract
A continued important area of research in hydrologic modeling is the issue of spatial and temporal scaling of biogeochemical properties and processes. Hurst analysis, which is a fractal-based scale invariant approach for analyzing long-term time series data, can provide insight into this issue as a quantitative approach for evaluating temporal scale in time series. The objectives of this paper were to compute the Hurst coefficient () for hydrologic and water quality variables, to study the effects of seasonality on , and to determine how the for the water quality indicators are related to that of the hydrologic parameters (e.g., discharge and rainfall). Two sites were investigated, Little River and Walker Branch, both located in east Tennessee. The water quality indicators include total coliform for Little River data and nitrate, chloride, sulfate, and calcium concentrations for Walker Branch data. was estimated using spectral analysis. It was found that for water quality indicators were significantly different from hydrologic parameters in an untransformed series, whereas it is not different in deseasonalized series (except total coliform). The comparison of untransformed and deseasonalized data series showed that there is no statistically significant value to deseasonalize the data, although the data series appears to shift toward random scaling after deseasonalization.
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Acknowledgments
Funding for this research was also provided by the Center for Environmental Biotechnology and the Inst. for a Secure and Sustainable Environment at the Univ. of Tennessee. We thank Doyle Prince, City of Maryville, TN for providing the coliform data for analysis. Some data were also collected as part of the long-term Walker Branch Watershed project at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Program for Ecosystem Research, in the Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research. Oak Ridge National Laboratory is managed by University of Tennessee-Battelle LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy under contract DOEDE-AC05-00OR22725.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 16 • Issue 9 • September 2011
Pages: 717 - 724
Copyright
© 2011 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Nov 4, 2009
Accepted: Dec 8, 2010
Published online: Dec 10, 2010
Published in print: Sep 1, 2011
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