A methodology to estimate flow duration curves at partially ungauged basins

Abstract

The flow duration curve (FDC) of streamflow at a specific site has a key role in the knowledge on the distribution and characteristics of streamflow at that site. The FDC gives information on the water regime, providing information to optimally manage the water resources of the river. In spite of its importance, because of the lack of streamflow gauging stations, the FDC construction can be a not straightforward task. In partially gauged basins, FDCs are usually built using regionalization among the other methods. In this paper we show that the FDC is not a characteristic of the basin only, but of both the basin and the weather. Different weather conditions lead to different FDCs for the same catchment. The differences can often be significant. Similarly, the FDC built at a site for a specific period cannot be used to retrieve the FDC at a different site for the same time window. In this paper, we propose a new methodology to estimate FDCs at partially gauged basins (i.e., target sites) using precipitation data gauged at another basin (i.e., donor site). The main idea is that it is possible to retrieve the FDC of a target period of time using the data gauged during a given donor time period for which data are available at both target and donor sites. To test the methodology, several donor and target time periods are analyzed and results are shown for different sites in the USA. The comparison between estimated and actually observed FDCs shows the reasonability of the approach, especially for intermediate percentiles.