Technical note: Statistical generation of climate-perturbed flow duration curves

Abstract

Assessing the robustness of a water resource system's performance under climate change involves exploring a wide range of streamflow conditions. This is often achieved through rainfall–runoff models, but these are commonly validated under historical conditions with no guarantee that calibrated parameters would still be valid in a different climate. In this note, we introduce a new method for the statistical generation of plausible streamflow futures. It flexibly combines changes in average flows with changes in the frequency and magnitude of high and low flows. It relies on a three-parameter analytical representation of the flow duration curve (FDC) that has been proved to perform well across a range of basins in different climates. We rigorously prove that, for common sets of streamflow statistics mirroring average behaviour, variability, and low flows, the parameterisation of the FDC under this representation is unique. We also show that conditions applied to these statistics for a solution to exist are commonly met in practice. These analytical results imply that streamflow futures can be explored by sampling wide ranges of three key flow statistics and by deriving the corresponding FDC in relation to model basin response across the full spectrum of flow conditions. We illustrate this method by exploring in which hydro-climatic futures a proposed run-of-river hydropower plant in eastern Turkey is financially viable. Results show that, contrary to approaches that modify streamflow statistics using multipliers applied uniformly throughout a time series, our approach seamlessly represents a large range of futures with increased frequencies of both high and low flows. This matches expected impacts of climate change in the region and supports analyses of the financial robustness of the proposed infrastructure to climate change. We conclude by highlighting how refinements to the approach could further support rigorous explorations of hydro-climatic futures without the help of rainfall–runoff models.