The Study on Ecological Basic Flow in Baoji Section of Wei River

Abstract

Through hydraulic engineering, the water division, which is taken by human beings, can often cause the lack of ecological basic flow in a watercourse, It becomes an important issue to guarantee the ecological basic flow. In fact, even if there was no interference from human, the river flow would also change constantly and would form certain ecological functions. Taking Baoji Section of Wei river as an instance, this paper, based on the analysis of its flow process with fine status, draws a conclusion that ecological function of the river is concerned with factors of both the flow capacity and the duration time of the flow. Various computational methods for ecological basic flow have been presented previously just with minimum discharge, however, time quantum is ignored. This article proposed that ecological basic flow should lie with water quantity and the duration time, also Tennant and minimum daily mean discharge method are adopted to calculate ecological basic flow. A new formula of Ecological basic flow was derived. Ecological basic flow and duration time in different frequency year in Baoji Section of Wei river are given.