An Investigation of the flow‐duration characteristics of North Carolina Streams

Abstract

Prior to the time the Committee on Runoff of the Boston Society of Civil Engineers published their report (Report of the Committee on Runoff, J. Bos. Soc. C. E., v. 9, No. 8, 1922), duration‐curves of stream‐flow had been prepared almost universally by plotting the runoff in cubic feet or in cubic feet per second per square mile as ordinates against the cumulative percentage of time as abscissae. [Note: Throughout this paper the basic unit of stream‐flow is defined as rate of discharge in cubic feet per second.] This report showed that if the ordinates were expressed as ratios to the mean flow, the duration‐curves for different streams in New England would be surprisingly similar, regardless of any differences in the size and character of the drainage‐basin, or in the total flow. This procedure, originally proposed by Hazen (Allen Hazen, Discussion of Power‐estimates from stream‐flow and rainfall‐data, by Dana Wood, J. Bos. Soc. C. E., v. 3, No. 3, 299–303, 1916), is confirmed by Barrows (H. K. Barrows, Water power engineering, p. 128, 1927), who maintains “…that for the rivers of the east and south the flow, as a per cent of the mean, could be expressed, for the dryer 80 per cent of the time, by the formula, log Q = (2.40 ‐ 0.011 T), where Q is discharge as a per cent of the mean and T is per cent of time.”

Flow-duration curves

“…The two principal methods used to construct flow-duration curves are (1) the calendar-year method (Barrows, 1943, p. 137-143 andSaville andWatson, 1933, p. 408-411) and (2) the total-period method.…”

A Stochastic Index Method for Calculating Annual Flow Duration Curves in Intermittent Rivers

“…Based on the so‐called calendar year technique (Saville and Watson, ; Barrows, ), Vogel and Fennessey () presented the concept of annual flow duration curves (AFDCs). These are specific formulations of the period‐of‐record FDCs, where the original daily flows are standardized to refer to a 'typical' (e.g.…”

Stream‐flow frequency distributions in California

“…This curve, plotted on coordinates of discharge versus per cent of time, has been widely used in studies con cerned with stream flow [BEARD, 1943;LIEBERMAN and HOOVER, 1951]. Analyses of flow-dura tion curves have been made by SAVILLE and WATSON [1933], FOSTER [1934], and MORGAN [1936]. Straight-line plotting of duration curves was studied by HARRIS [1932] based on the work of GOOD RICH [1927] on skew distributions.…”