HR: 0800h
AN: H31B-12    [Abstracts]
TI: DEVELOPMENT OF REPRESENTATIVE HYDROLOGIC INDICATORS FOR STREAMFLOW ALTERATION
AU: * Gao, Y
EM: xuan.gao@tufts.edu
AF: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Tufts University, 113 Anderson Hall 200 College Avenue, Medford, MA 02155, United States
AU: Vogel, R
EM: richard.vogel@tufts.edu
AF: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Tufts University, 113 Anderson Hall 200 College Avenue, Medford, MA 02155, United States
AU: Kroll, C
EM: cnkroll@esf.edu
AF: Department of Environmental Resources and Forest Engineering State University of New York, SUNY-ESF 312 Bray Hall 1 Forestry Dr., Syracuse, NY 13210-2778, United States
AU: Poff, N L
EM: poff@lamar.colostate.edu
AF: Department of Biology Colorado State University, Department of Biology Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523, United States
AU: Olden, J
EM: olden@u.washington.edu
AF: School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences University of Washington, University of Washington School of Aquatic & Fishery Sciences Box 355020, Seattle, WA 98195-5020, United States
AB: To study the impact of river regulation due to dams and to design optimal reservoir operation policies, hydrologic indicators, which describe the overall health of the river and the degree of hydrological alteration caused by a particular reservoir operation policy, are needed. Currently over 170 hydrologic indicators have been recommended to describe various aspects of streamflow regimes. Many of these indicators are redundant or correlated, including many of the Indicators of Hydrological Alteration (IHA), which is a set of 67 commonly used indicators. This has made environmental flow management difficult. Hence, there is an increasing need to develop a smaller set of independent, representative indicators. The objective of this research is to develop a small set of representative hydrologic indicators that best characterize hydrologic alteration caused by reservoirs. To compute the values of the above-mentioned indicators, simulated streamflow data generated from a software tool called Water Evaluation And Planning (WEAP) and real pre- and post-dam streamflow data measured at 200 US Geological Survey sites are used. Principal component analysis (PCA) is performed to evaluate the ability of the proposed hydrologic indicators to represent the complete variability expressed using the IHA parameters. Preliminary results of the PCA indicate that "ecodeficit", which is the area below the pre-impact flow duration curve (FDC) and above the post-impact FDC of a site, is one good candidate of such hydrologic indicators.
DE: 1808 Dams
DE: 1813 Eco-hydrology
DE: 1857 Reservoirs (surface)
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: 2007 Joint Assembly