Methods to estimate historical daily streamflow for ungaged stream locations in Minnesota

Abstract

Effective and responsible management of water resources relies on a thorough understanding of the quantity and quality of available water; however, streamgages cannot be installed at every location where streamflow information is needed. Therefore, methods for estimating streamflow at ungaged stream locations need to be developed. This report presents a statewide study to develop methods to estimate the structure of historical daily streamflow at ungaged stream locations in Minnesota. Historical daily mean streamflow at ungaged locations in Minnesota can be estimated by transferring streamflow data at streamgages to the ungaged location using the QPPQ method. The QPPQ method uses flow-duration curves at an index streamgage, relying on the assumption that exceedance probabilities are equivalent between the index streamgage and the ungaged location, and estimates the flow at the ungaged location using the estimated flow-duration curve. Flowduration curves at ungaged locations can be estimated using recently developed regression equations that have been incorporated into StreamStats (http://streamstats.usgs.gov/), which is a U.S. Geological Survey Web-based interactive mapping tool that can be used to obtain streamflow statistics, drainagebasin characteristics, and other information for user-selected locations on streams.

Hydrological Modelling and Water Resources Assessment of Chongwe River Catchment using WEAP Model

“…Effective and responsible management of water resources relies on a thorough understanding of the quantity and quality of available water [14]. This study aims to provide a quantitative estimation of the available water resources, characteristics of each hydrological component, and water balance of the Chongwe River catchment with the goal of providing technical recommendations on sustainable integrated water resource management and development for the Chongwe River catchment.…”

Copula Theory as a Generalized Framework for Flow‐Duration Curve Based Streamflow Estimates in Ungaged and Partially Gaged Catchments

“…Of the suite of statistical approaches that are available (Razavi & Coulibaly, 2012), flow-duration curve (FDC) based methods are considered one of the most reliable (Archfield & Vogel, 2010;Booker & Snelder, 2012;Farmer et al, 2015b;Lorenz & Ziegeweid, 2016;Mohamoud, 2008;Zhang et al, 2015). This is in part because they separately model the shape of the FDC and the timing of streamflow events at the target site, allowing for the use of information tailored for each of those components.…”

Techniques for estimating the magnitude and frequency of peak flows on small streams in the binational U.S. and Canadian Lake of the Woods–Rainy River Basin upstream from Kenora, Ontario, Canada, based on data through water year 2013

“…Previous studies in the LOW-RRB (Prior, 1949;Prior and Hess, 1961;Wiitala, 1965;Patterson and Gamble, 1968;Guetzkow, 1977;Sangal, 1983;Moin and Shaw, 1985;Jacques and Lorenz, 1987;Lorenz andothers, 1997, 2010;Kessler and others, 2013;Lorenz and Ziegeweid, 2016;Ziegeweid and others, 2015) have provided flow frequency information at selected streamgages and methods for calculating flow frequency data at ungaged sites in Minnesota. Regulated streamgages were not used in the analysis of smaller events such as the 2-, 5-, 10-, and 25-year peak flows but were included in the analysis of 50-and 100-year return period peak flows with the premise that regulation has less effect on larger events (Moin and Shaw, 1985;Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, 2013).…”