Hydrologic Modification and Vanishing Self-Organized Criticality of River Flows Caused by Dam Operations
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 21, Issue 12
Abstract
Widespread dam construction has significantly altered natural hydrologic processes and consequently affected river ecosystems. The concept of self-organized criticality (SOC) implies the ability of a system to create and maintain its own function and has important implications for the entire ecosystem, thus can be used to assess anthropogenic disturbances. This study focuses on how reservoir operations affect the SOC behavior of river flows. Taking five large-sized reservoirs in China as examples, the maximum likelihood methods, Kolmogorov Smirnov testing and Detrended Fluctuation Analysis, are used to examine the typical SOC fingerprints for daily river flow series, including their power law frequency-magnitude distributions and long-range correlations. The results show that with increasing reservoir-modified pressure, the frequency-magnitude relationships of natural flows gradually deviate from heavy-tailed power laws and tend to behave as normal or lognormal distributions, characterized by vanishing tails and narrower spans. Furthermore, dam-influenced flows tend to display delayed scaling break times, decreased fluctuations, and increased long-range persistence, and their variations demonstrate more anisotropic. The results indicate that a loss of hydrologic diversity is gradually revealed because of reservoir regulation, and further emphasize restoration of the distributional and temporal characteristics of natural flows rather than a focus on simple ecoflow constraints.
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Acknowledgments
The research was supported by the Science Fund for Creative Research Groups of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51321065), National Natural Science Foundation of China (51109156), and the Programme of Introducing Talents of Discipline to Universities (B14012). The authors profoundly thank P. Bak, A. Clauset, and his colleagues for offering new perspectives and statistical methods. The authors also acknowledge the assistance of all editors and reviewers.
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Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 21 • Issue 12 • December 2016
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© 2016 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Apr 16, 2016
Accepted: Jul 14, 2016
Published online: Aug 23, 2016
Published in print: Dec 1, 2016
Discussion open until: Jan 23, 2017
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