The Use of the Recession Index as Indicator for Components of Flow

Abstract

Hydrograph recession analysis is widely used in hydrological research and water resources planning and management. The most common application is the forecasting of low flows, estimating groundwater resources in a catchment, rainfall runoff models and hydrograph analysis. In the rainfall runoff modelling, some authors have included the recession characteristics in their model. They used the recession parameter for hydrograph separation and modelling surface runoff.This paper presents an alternative commonly used techniques for hydrograph recession analysis, namely of an individual recession segment, the master recession and a relatively recent approach based on wavelet transform was carried out in order to separate analytically the linear component hydrographs by recession index K that is commonly used as an indicator of flow. These methods were applied to a set of measures hydrometric the North-eastern Algeria in the watershed Seybouse. The results show that all the methods tested produce reasonable and comparable results.