Effect of the Length of the Streamflow Record on Truncation Level for Assessment of Streamflow Drought Characteristics
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 19, Issue 7
Abstract
The effect of length of streamflow records on truncation level (TL) and consequent drought characterization using streamflow data for a 50 year period at Banda (Ken river) and Nandghat (Seonath river) sites in India are studied. The study demonstrates the divergence in estimates of TL from different sets of data of various assessment lengths of duration and severity of independent streamflow drought events. TL for each 10-day (sum of 10 days streamflow volume) period during the year have been estimated as 75% of dependable flow value from corresponding flow duration curves prepared for datasets of various lengths and periods. A pooling procedure has been used to identify independent streamflow drought events. The study revealed that the estimation of TL using data covering fewer than 30 years shows considerable variations and may lead to biased estimates in TL values in the study basins. However, the estimates of TL derived from datasets covering 30 years or more are reasonably close to that of TL derived from 50 years of data, and the assessment for duration and severity of drought events are comparable. Therefore, data spanning 30 years or more should be used for realistic stream flow drought characterization.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
References
Beersma, J. J., and Buishand, T. A. (2004). “Joint probability of precipitation and discharge deficits in the Netherlands.” Water Resour. Res., 40(12), W12508.
Ben-Zvi, A. (1987). “Indices of hydrological drought in Israel.” J. Hydrol., 92(1–2), 179–191.
Bonacci, O. (1993). “Hydrological identification of drought.” Hydrol. Process., 7(3), 249–262.
Burroughs, W. J. (2001). Climate change: A multidisciplinary approach, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K.
Chang, T. J., and Kleopa, X. (1991). “A proposed method for drought monitoring.” Water Resour. Bull., 27(2), 275–281.
Chang, T. J., and Stenson, J. R. (1990). “Is it realistic to define a 100-year drought for water management?” Water Resour. Bull., 26(5), 823–829.
Chen, S. T., Kuo, C. C., and Yu, P. S. (2009). “Historical trends and variability of meteorological droughts in Taiwan.” Hydrol. Sci. J., 54(3), 430–441.
Clausen, B., and Pearson, C. P. (1995). “Regional frequency analysis of annual maximum streamflow drought.” J. Hydrol., 173(1–4), 111–130.
Dracup, J. A., Lee, K. S., and Paulson, E. G., Jr. (1980a). “On the statistical characteristics of drought events.” Water Resour. Res., 16(2), 289–296.
Dracup, J. A., Lee, K. S., and Paulson, E. G., Jr. (1980b). “On the definition of droughts.” Water Resour. Res., 16(2), 297–302.
Edossa, D. C., Babel, M. S., and Gupta, A. D. (2010). “Drought analysis in the Awash River Basin, Ethiopia.” Water Resour. Manage., 24(7), 1441–1460.
Fleig, A. K., Tallaksen, L. M., Hisdal, H. Y., and Demuth, S. (2006). “A global evaluation of streamflow drought characteristics.” Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 10(4), 532–552.
Griffiths, G. K. (1990). “Rainfall deficits: Distribution of monthly runs.” J. Hydrol., 115(1–4), 219–229.
Hannaford, J., Lloyd-Hughes, B., Keef, C., Parry, S., and Prudhomme, C. (2011). “Examining the large-scale spatial coherence of European drought using regional indicators of precipitation and streamflow deficit.” Hydrol. Process., 25(7), 1146–1162.
Hisdal, H., and Tallaksen, L. M. (2003). “Estimation of regional meteoro-logical and hydrological drought characteristics: A case study for Denmark.” J. Hydrol., 281(3), 230–247.
Hisdal, H., Tallaksen, L. M., Clausen, B., Peters, E., and Gustard, A. (2004). “Hydrological drought characteristics.” Hydrological drought-processes and estimation methods for streamflow and groundwater, L. M. Tallaksen and H. A. J. Van Lanen, eds., Elsevier, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 139–182.
Khedun, C. P., Chowdhary, H., Mishra, A. K., Giardino, J. R., and Singh, V. P. (2013). “Water deficit duration and severity analysis based on runoff derived from the noah land surface model.” J. Hydrol. Eng., 817–833.
Kjeldsen, T. R., Lundorf, A., and Rosbjerg, D. (2000). “Use of a two-component exponential distribution in partial duration modelling of hydrological droughts in Zimbabwean rivers.” Hydrol. Sci. J., 45(2), 285–298.
Landsberg, H. E. (1975). “The definition and determination of climate changes, fluctuations and outlooks.” Atmospheric quality and climatic change, R. J. Kopec, ed., Univ. of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 57.
Lorenzo-Lacruz, J., et al. (2010). “The impact of droughts and water management on various hydrological systems in the headwaters of the Tagus River (central Spain).” J. Hydrol., 386(1–4), 13–26.
Madsen, H., and Rosbjerg, D. (1995). “On the modelling of extreme droughts.” Modelling and Management of sustainable basin-scale water resources systems: Proc., Boulder Symp. July 1995, International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS), U.K., 377–385.
McKee, T. B., Doesken, N. J., and Kleist, J. (1993). “The Relationship of Drought Frequency and Duration to Time Scales.” 8th Conf. on Applied Climatology, American Meteorological Society, Anaheim, CA.
Meigh, J., Tate, E., and McCartney, M. (2002). “Methods for identifying and monitoring river flow drought in southern Africa.” FRIEND 2002—Regional hydrology: Bridging the gap between research and practice, H. A. J. Van Lanen and S. Demuth, eds., IAHS, U.K., 181–188.
Mishra, A. K., and Singh, V. P. (2010). “A review of drought concepts.” J. Hydrol., 391(1–2), 202–216.
Nalbantis, I., and Tsakiris, G. (2009). “Assessment of hydrological drought revisited.” Water Resour. Manage., 23(5), 881–897.
Pandey, R. P., Mishra, S. K., Singh, R., and Ramasastri, K. S. (2008). “Streamflow drought severity analysis of Betwa River System (India).” Water Resour. Manage., 22(8), 1127–1141.
Pandey, R. P., and Ramasastri, K. S. (2002). “Incidence of droughts in different climatic regions.” Hydrol. Sci. J., 47(Suppl. 1), S31–S40.
Pandey, R. P., and Ramasastri, K. S. (2003). “Estimation of lean season water availability in streams with limited data.” J. Inst. Eng., 84, 149–152.
Rajsekhar, D., Mishra, A. K., and Singh, V. P. (2013). “Regionalization of drought characteristics using an entropy approach.” J. Hydrol. Eng., 870–887.
Sen, Z. (1980). “Statistical analysis of hydrologic critical droughts.” J. Hydraul. Div., 106(1), 99–115.
Tabari, H., Nikbakht, J., and Talaee, P. H. (2013). “Hydrological drought assessment in Northwestern Iran based on Streamflow Drought Index (SDI).” Water Resour. Manage., 27(1), 137–151.
Tallaksen, L. M., Madsen, H., and Clausen, B. (1997). “On the definition and modelling of streamflow drought duration and deficit volume.” Hydrol. Sci. J., 42(1), 15–33.
Tallaksen, L. M., and Van Lanen, H. A. J. (2004). “Hydrological drought—Processes and estimation methods for streamflow and groundwater.” Developments in water sciences 48, Elsevier, Netherlands.
Tate, E. L., and Freeman, S. N. (2000). “Three modeling approaches for seasonal streamflow droughts in the southern Africa: The use of censored data.” Hydrol. Sci. J., 45(1), 27–42.
Tate, E. L., and Gustard, A. (2000). “Drought definition: A hydrological perspective.” Drought and drought mitigation in Europe, Kluwer, Dordrecht, Netherlands, 23–48.
Vasiliades, L., and Loukas, A. (2009). “Hydrological response to meteoro-logical drought using the palmer drought indices in Thessaly, Greece.” Desalination, 237(1–3), 3–21.
Vasiliades, L., Loukas, A., and Liberis, N. (2011). “A water balance derived drought index for Pinios River Basin, Greece.” Water Resour. Manage., 25(4), 1087–1101.
Vicente-Serrano, S. M., et al. (2012). “Accurate computation of a streamflow drought index.” J. Hydrol. Eng., 318–332.
Vidal, J. P., et al. (2010). “Multilevel and multi scale drought reanalysis over France with the Safran-Isba-Modcou hydrometeorological suite.” Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 14(3), 459–478.
Wilhite, D. A., and Glantz, M. H. (1985). “Understanding the drought phenomenon: The role of definitions.” Water Int. 10(3):111–120.
World Meteorological Organization (WMO). (1975). “Drought and agriculture.”, Geneva, Switzerland.
Wu, H., Hayes, M. J., Wilhite, D. A., and Svoboda, M. D. (2005). “The effect of the length of record on the standardized precipitation index calculation.” Int. J. Climatol., 25(4), 505–520.
Wu, H., Soh, L. K., Samal, A., and Chen, X. H. (2007). “Trend analysis of streamflow drought events in Nebraska.” Water Resour. Manage., 22(2), 145–164.
Zaidman, M. D., Rees, H. G., and Young, A. R. (2001). “Spatio-temporal development of streamflow droughts in north-west Europe.” Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 6(4), 733–751.
Zelenhasic, E., and Salvai, A. (1987). “A method of streamflow drought analysis.” Water Resour. Res., 23(1), 156–168.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 19 • Issue 7 • July 2014
Pages: 1361 - 1373
Copyright
© 2013 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Mar 13, 2013
Accepted: Oct 15, 2013
Published online: Oct 17, 2013
Discussion open until: Mar 17, 2014
Published in print: Jul 1, 2014
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.