On the behaviour of dynamic contributing areas and flood frequency curves in North American Prairie watersheds

Quantifying terrain controls on runoff retention and routing in the Northern Prairies

“…The importance of adequate representation of depression connectivity varies depending on the model purpose. Previous studies highlighted the role of depression connectivity in runoff routing (Ehsanzadeh et al, ; Mekonnen et al, ; Shook & Pomeroy, ). Similar effects were observed for a range of runoff values in subwatersheds investigated in the present study (Figure ).…”

“…Previous studies in the Northern Prairies successfully applied DEM analysis to evaluate depression storage capacity (Huang et al, ; Wu & Lane, ). Additionally, DEMs coupled with distributed hydrological models were used to investigate the dynamic contributing areas in the Prairies terrain (Ehsanzadeh, Spence, Kamp, & McConkey, ; Mekonnen et al, ; Shaw, Pietroniro, et al, 2012; Shaw, van der Kamp, Conly, Pietroniro, & Martz, ) and to validate simpler parametrised models (Shook, Pomeroy, Spence, & Boychuk, ). However, applicability of the results obtained in the previous studies elsewhere in the Prairies remains unclear.…”

ZeroFlow: A PUB (Prediction in Ungauged Basins) Workshop on Temporary Streams Summary of Workshop Discussions and Future Directions

“…Some Canadian watersheds have large and dynamic noncontributing areas. Progress is being made on understanding (Ehsanzadeh et al, 2012) and predicting (DeBeer and Pomeroy, 2010) the regime of temporary streams and non-contributing areas. The changing nature of contributing areas and hysteresis in the relation between the contributing area and storage were illustrated by Kevin Shook from the University of Saskatchewan (Shook and Pomeroy, 2011).…”

On the Relationship Between Flood and Contributing Area

“…Sci. (Ehsanzadeh et al, 2012;Kusumastuti et al, 2008) there are few examples of estimates of contributing area frequency distributions (e.g., Jencso et al, 2009) and none for this region. The models of Smith et al (2013) and Reaney et al (2013) are valuable for estimating contributing area over the required timescales, but they are not necessarily suited to larger watersheds.…”

“…Furthermore, literature implies that underlying mechanisms behind contributing area dynamics for different return periods may vary and be described best as a mixture of distributions (Ehsanzadeh et al, 2012). If the samples of contributing area or streamflow did not fit either the…”