Regionalization of flow duration curves in Colombia

Abstract

It is essential to know the streamflow behavior in hydrological basins for appropriate water resource planning and management. In Colombia, where there is a considerable water resource potential, there is a need to generate hydrological modeling for many ungauged catchments. Thus, this study presents the regionalization of flow duration curves (FDC) in Colombia. Daily flow time series from 655 gauging stations were used to define homogenous hydrological regions, considering geological, topographic, and climatic information. Fifteen hydrological regions were delimited by cluster analysis using the K-means algorithm, all of which exhibited high spatial heterogeneity. Multiple linear regressions were used to estimate characteristic dimensionless flows as a function of each basin's attributes. A set of equations that allow the reconstruction of simulated dimensionless FDC for each cluster was determined, and regression (R2) values of 0.5–0.9 were obtained. The percentage error of the mean, maximum, and minimum discharge of the simulated FDC compared with observed values were approximately 9, 30, and 50%, respectively.

Transboundary River Water Availability to Ravi Riverfront under Changing Climate: A Step towards Sustainable Development

“…These agree with Adeyeri et al [75] and [78], who reported separately that over land in the dry season with minimum high flows, there is a positive correlation between precipitation and temperature due to the low moisture-holding capacity of the atmosphere. The estimation of flows is very critical, especially in the ungauged river basins, and it has been a big challenge for the hydrologist from a planning and management perspective [65,79,80]. The FDC form resulted from the geomorphological attributes and their interrelations [81], which are very complex.…”

“…The flow duration curve indicates flow availability and the percentage of the equal or exceedance over a specific period in that river basin [57][58][59]. FDCs have been widely used in almost all types (i.e., mountainous, cold regions, semi-arid to arid regions) of river basins for hydrological analysis [60][61][62][63][64][65][66]. Generally, any FDC graph contains the flow on the Y-axis, whereas the X-axis includes the number of days exceedance from a particular flow-relative percentile flow [57,58].…”