River Flow Regimes and Effective Discharge

Abstract:

The concept of effective discharge is widespread in geomorphology and river engineering and restoration. For example, it is used to design the most stable channel configuration, to estimate sedimentation rate and lifespan of reservoirs and to characterize the hydrologic forcing in models studying long-term evolution of rivers. Accordingly, the effective discharge has been the focus of countless empirical, theoretical and numerical studies, which found it to vary among catchments as a function of climate, landscape and river morphology, type of transport (dissolved, suspended or bedload), and of streamflow variability. The heterogeneity of the effective discharge values observed in different catchments challenges a thorough understanding of its pivotal drivers, and a consistent framework which explains observations carried out in different geographic areas is still lacking.

In the present work, the observed diversity is explained in terms of the underlying heterogeneity of river flow regimes, by linking effective discharge to attributes of the sediment rating curve and to streamflow variability, as resulting from climatic and landscape drivers. An analytic expression of the effective ratio (i.e. the ratio between effective discharge and mean streamflow) is provided, which captures observed values of effective discharge for suspended sediment transport in a set of catchments of the continental United States. The framework disentangles hydrologic and landscape controls on effective discharge, and highlights distinct effective ratios of persistent and erratic hydrologic regimes (respectively characterized by low and high flow variability), attributable to intrinsically different streamflow dynamics. Clusters of river catchments characterized by similar streamflow dynamics can be identified. The framework provides an opportunity for first-order estimates of effective discharge in rivers belonging to different areas, based on the type of flow regime.