Applications of intervention analysis to model the impact of drought and bushfires of Water Quality

Abstract

Intervention analysis is a rigorous statistical modelling technique used to measure the effect of a shift in the mean level of a time series, caused by an intervention. A general formulation of an intervention model is applied to water-quality data for two streams in north-eastern Victoria, measuring the effect of drought on the electrical conductivity of one stream, and the effect of bushfires on the flow and turbidity of the other. The nature of the intervention is revealed using exploratory data-analysis techniques, such as smoothing and boxplots, on the time-series data. Intervention analysis is then used to confirm the identified changes and estimate their magnitude. The increased level of electrical conductivity due to drought is determined by three techniques of estimation and the results compared. The best of these techniques is then used to model changes in stream flow and turbidity following bushfires in the catchment.