The Probability Distribution of Daily Streamflow

Abstract:

Flow duration curves (FDCs) are a graphical illustration of the cumulative distribution of streamflow. Daily streamflows often range over many orders of magnitude, making it extremely challenging to find a probability distribution function (pdf) which can mimic the steady state or period of record FDC (POR-FDC). Median annual FDCs (MA-FDCs) describe the pdf of daily streamflow in a typical year. For POR- and MA-FDCs, Lmoment diagrams, visual assessments of FDCs and Quantile-Quantile probability plot correlation coefficients are used to evaluate goodness of fit (GOF) of candidate probability distributions. FDCs reveal that both four-parameter kappa (KAP) and three-parameter generalized Pareto (GP3) models result in very high GOF for the MA-FDC and a relatively lower GOF for POR-FDCs at over 500 rivers across the coterminous U.S. Physical basin characteristics, such as baseflow index as well as hydroclimatic indices such as the aridity index and the runoff ratio are found to be correlated with one of the shape parameters (kappa) of the KAP and GP3 pdfs. Our work also reveals several important areas for future research including improved parameter estimators for the KAP pdf, as well as increasing our understanding of the conditions which give rise to improved GOF of analytical pdfs to large samples of daily streamflows.