Improved methods for daily streamflow estimates at ungauged sites

Abstract

In this paper, improved flow duration curve (FDC) and area ratio (AR) based methods are developed to obtain better daily streamflow estimation at ungauged sites. A regression based logarithmic interpolation method which makes no assumption on the distribution or shape of a FDC is introduced in this paper to estimate regional FDCs. The estimated FDC is combined with a spatial interpolation algorithm to obtain daily streamflow estimates. Multiple source sites based AR methods, especially the geographical distance weighted AR (GWAR) method, are introduced in an effort to maximize the use of regional information and improve the standard AR method (SAR). Performances of the proposed approaches are evaluated using a jackknife procedure. The application to 109 stations in the province of Quebec, Canada indicates that the FDC based methods outperform AR based methods in all the summary statistics including Nash, root mean squared error (RMSE), and Bias. The number of sites that show better performances using the FDC based approaches is also significantly larger than the number of sites showing better performances using AR based methods. Using geographical distance weighted multiple sources sites based approaches can improve the performance at the majority of the catchments comparing with using the single source site based approaches.