ANALYSIS AND EXTRACTION OF LOW FLOW RECESSION CHARACTERISTICS¹

Abstract

It is important to extract and assess low flow recession characteristics for water resources planning in the upper reaches of streams. However, it is very difficult to express synthetically the low flow recession characteristics for a stream flow. In this paper, first a new method of constructing the master recession curve based on the exponential expression is proposed and applied with the restriction that there are no regulation or diversion structures in the upper reaches above the measurement station. Daily precipitation and stream flow were used for the analysis. Second, analysis for a recession constant was conducted and the relationship between the recession constant and low flow and/or geology was qualitatively examined. In conclusion, the application of the proposed method indicated that it is objective and useful for constructing the master recession curve. It became apparent that the recession constant of a master recession curve may be defined as the total index of low flow characteristics. In addition, it was found that baseflow value increases in the order of Paleozoic, Mesozoic, Tertiary, and Quaternary.

Estimation of streamflow recession parameters: New insights from an analytic streamflow distribution model

“…This necessarily raises the need for methods to define a pair of constant recession parameters from streamflow records, which are known as recession analysis methods (RAMs; Stoelzle, Stahl, & Weiler, ). The many methods proposed in the literature have usually specific purposes (Tallaksen, ), such as low flow studies (Aksoy & Wittenberg, ; Bako & Hunt, ; Gottschalk, Tallaksen, & Perzyna, ; Sugiyama, ), rainfall‐run‐off modelling (Kirchner, ; Müller, Dralle, & Thompson, ; Rupp & Woods, ), the estimation of groundwater storage variations at catchment scale (Kirchner, ; Vogel & Kroll, ), or studies on the geomorphologic origin of streamflow (Biswal & Marani, ; Biswal & Nagesh, ; Mutzner et al, ). Recession analysis has also been used to study catchment similarity (Sawicz, Wagener, Sivapalan, Troch, & Carrillo, ), hydrological regimes (Botter, Basso, Rodriguez‐Iturbe, & Rinaldo, ), or to study how land use can affect the recession behaviour (Bogaart, Van Der Velde, Lyon, & Dekker, ; Sawaske & Freyberg, ).…”

Comparative analysis of baseflow characteristics of two Andean catchments, Ecuador

“…Recession mechanisms have been subject of diverse studies covering different scopes: mathematical development, basic assumptions and linearization problems (Hall, 1968); use of statistical packages to speed up the baseflow recession constant derivation and its field application (Bako and Hunt, 1988;Bako and Owoade, 1988); geomorphological analysis and recession characteristics in mountainous watersheds (Zecharias and Brutsaert, 1988); automation of recession analysis towards development of regional models for ungauged catchments (Nathan and McMahon, 1990); relation of recession constant and geology (Sugiyama, 1996); use of master recession curves for estimating empirical catchment averaged discharge-relative storage relationships (Lamb and Beven, 1997); comparison of techniques for hydrograph recession analysis (Sujono et al, 2004); and base flow recession analysis for assessing human impact on low flows (Wang and Cai, 2009).…”

Numerical Simulation of Spring Hydrograph Recession Curves for East Yorkshire Chalk Aquifer, UK

“…To overcome the problem of variation which exists between recession curves from different years a master recession curve MRC technique was used for constructing a mean recession curve. Several approaches can be used for constructing a master recession curve: e.g., matching strip, correlation and tabulation method (Brownlee, 1960;Toebes and Strang, 1994;Hall, 1968;Toebes, 1969;Brutsaert and Nieber, 1977;Sugiyama, 1996). In this study the tabulation method was used as it is the most appropriate technique for constructing a MRC for a range of years.…”