Abstract
Abstract. Comparative analysis has been a little used approach to the teaching of hydrology. Instead, hydrology is often taught by introducing fundamental principles with the assumption that they are sufficiently universal to apply across most any hydrologic system. In this paper, we illustrate the value of using comparative analysis to enhance students' insights into the degree and predictability of future non-stationarity in flood frequency analysis. Traditionally, flood frequency analysis is taught from a statistical perspective that can offer limited means of understanding the nature of non-stationarity. By visually comparing graphics of mean daily flows and annual peak discharges (plotted against Julian day) for watersheds in a variety of locales, distinct differences in the timing and nature of flooding in different regions of the US becomes readily apparent. Such differences highlight the dominant hydroclimatological drivers of different watersheds. When linked with information on the predictability of hydroclimatic drivers (hurricanes, atmospheric rivers, snowpack melt, convective events) in a changing climate, such comparative analysis provides students with an improved physical understanding of flood processes and a stronger foundation on which to make judgments about how to modify statistical techniques for making predictions in a changing climate. We envision that such comparative analysis could be incorporated into a number of other traditional hydrologic topics.
Highlights
Comparative analysis has not been a broadly used tool in hydrology, especially with respect to elucidating processes
This paper examines the value of comparative hydrology in deciphering different flood causative processes in different regions
Students can be asked to investigate the degree to which different causative mechanisms can be predicted in a changing climate. In merging this type of comparative analysis exercise with standard flood frequency analysis, students benefit from a better sense of the variation in underlying flood-causative processes and gain better intuition on how and when to implement changes to statistical models in a non-stationary world
Summary
Comparative analysis has not been a broadly used tool in hydrology, especially with respect to elucidating processes. This can possibly be attributed to hydrology’s traditional orientation to the physical sciences. Horton, 1933), which corresponded well with smallscale soil infiltration research, which, in turn, was used to test analytical solutions of the perceived mechanisms. Such infiltration models were implemented in watershed-scale models such as SWAT (Gassman et al, 2007) with the presumption the small-scale processes would aggregate to replicate watershed-scale processes. A comparative analysis of hydrologic phenomenon at the scale of interest (i.e. watersheds) has often been considered unnecessary given a presumed ability to directly simulate the differing physical mechanisms that underlay the watershed scale phenomenon
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