On the generation of drought events using an alternating renewal-reward model

Abstract

This research study focused on the hypothesis that extreme drought and high streamflow events come from different independent populations with different probability distributions which need to be studied separately, rather than considering the streamflow population as a whole. The inability of traditional streamflow generator models to consistently reproduce the frequency of occurrence of severe droughts observed in the historical record has been questioned by many researchers. Our study focused on the development of astochastic event generator model which would be capable of doing so. This was accomplished in a two-step process by first generating the drought event, and then deriving the streamflows which comprised that event. The model considered for this analysis was an alternating renewal-reward procedure that cycles between eventon andoff times, and is representative of drought or high streamflow event duration. The reward gained while the event ison oroff represents drought severity or high streamflow surplus. Geometric and gamma distributions were considered for drought duration and deficit respectively. Model validation was performed using calculated required capacities from the sequent peak algorithm.