On the need for streamflow drought frequency guidelines in the U.S.

Abstract

Extreme drought and resulting low streamflows occur throughout the U.S., causing billions of dollars in annual losses, detrimentally impacting ecosystems, as well as agricultural, hydropower, navigation, water supply, recreation, and a myriad of other water resource systems, leading to reductions in both the effectiveness and resiliency of our water resource infrastructure. Since 1966, with the introduction of Bulletin 13 titled ‘Methods of Flow Frequency Analysis’, the U.S. adopted uniform guidelines for performing flood flow frequency analysis to ensure and enable all federal agencies concerned with water resource design, planning, and management under flood conditions to obtain sensible, consistent, and reproducible estimators of flood flow statistics. Remarkably, over one-half century later, no uniform national U.S. guidelines for hydrologic drought streamflow frequency analysis exist, and the various assorted guidelines that do exist are not reliable because (1) they are based on methods developed for floods, which are distinctly different than low streamflows and (2) the methods do not take advantage of the myriad of advances in flood and low streamflow frequency analyses over the last 50 years. We provide a justification for the need for developing national guidelines for streamflow drought frequency analysis as an analog to the existing national guidelines for flood frequency analysis. Those guidelines should result in improved water resources design, planning, operations, and management under low streamflow conditions throughout the U.S. and could prove useful elsewhere.

Going Beyond Low Flows: Streamflow Drought Deficit and Duration Illuminate Distinct Spatiotemporal Drought Patterns and Trends in the U.S. During the Last Century

“…The fixed threshold may be more useful in cases where an absolute constraint is impactful, including a specified water level for river navigation or irrigation pumping. This work and the corresponding data release provide drought metrics for five thresholds and two approaches so that these data may be useful for a broad set of users and for informing recently recommended national guidelines for streamflow drought frequency analysis (Vogel & Kroll, 2021).…”

“…Different methodologies for quantifying streamflow drought exist due to the variety of different drought types, the difficulty in determining a universal threshold of drought, and the various dimensions of drought events, such as intensity, duration, deficit volume, frequency, and areal extent (Andreadis & Lettenmaier, 2006; Vogel & Kroll, 2021). Streamflow drought characterization methods can be categorized as standardized indices or threshold level approaches (Van Loon, 2015).…”

Drought intensity–duration–frequency curves based on deficit in precipitation and streamflow for water resources management

“…Deficit-IDF curves for the design under drought conditions have not been well established in literature and practice. There is an emerging need for guidelines worldwide to use in water resources design, planning, operation and management under low-flow or drought conditions (Vogel and Kroll, 2021). Similar to the precipitation IDF curves used in hydrological practice (Chow et al, 1988), deficit-IDF curves developed in this study can therefore be considered an improvement towards the design under drought conditions.…”