A geostatistical approach to estimate flow duration curve parameters in ungauged basins

Abstract

Flow duration curve represents the percentage of time that a river flow is equal to or greater. As these curves provide a direct response to the behavior of water resources in a basin, which is used widely in hydropower projects, it is important to predict flow duration curves in no metering basins, named “ungagged basins.” The geostatistical approach to predict the values of these curves in non-measured stations shows the expansion of the range of studies in this topic. The aim of this study is to predict the flow duration curve over long periods of time in a basin with ungauged regions using probability kriging, inverse distance weighting (IDW) and maximum likelihood (ML) methods. Flow data from 38 flow measuring stations in the Dez Basin were used to map different discharges of the flow duration curve, and as a result, in order to complete their values, zone and quantify them, three different values of Q10, Q50 and Q90 of the flow duration curve acquired. The results show that as the flow rate increases (or the time percentage decreases), the amount of computational error increases and in all cases, the probability kriging method has a smaller error (0.96) than the IDW (1.65) and ML (1.15) methods.