Regionalization of Flow Duration Curves for West Flowing Rivers of India

Abstract

AbstractA flow duration curve (FDC) by providing a concise description of the temporal variability of streamflow from a river basin is extremely useful as a hydrological signature and also in the design of water resources projects. However, long-term historical measured streamflow records are essential to derive the FDC, and hence, a major challenge has been to develop methods to estimate the FDC for ungauged river basins. Also, for the derived FDC to provide an accurate representation of the variability of natural flows, no regulations/abstractions must exist upstream of the gauging station. Therefore, the present study was being taken up to develop a methodology for prediction of FDCs in ungauged river basins located in the hydrologically homogeneous West flowing rivers of India using streamflow records of 14 unregulated river basins. FDCs were derived for each basin using frequency analysis, and flow quantiles at specific exceedance probabilities were extracted. Subsequently, the regionalization approach involving transfer of hydrological information from gauged basins to ungauged basins was adopted by developing regression models relating flow quantiles to easily derived basin physical characteristics. The performance of the developed regression models was evaluated using validation datasets and found to yield satisfactory results. Results of this study will permit estimation of flow quantiles and FDCs in ungauged basins located within West flowing rivers of India.KeywordsFlow duration curvesRegionalizationRegression analysis