Developing Non-Stationary Frequency Relationships for Greater Pamba River basin, Kerala India incorporating dominant climatic precursors

• Published in: Proceedings of IAHS
• Main Authors: Nair, Arathy, Sankaran, Adarsh, Geetha Mohan, Meera, Vijayalakshmi, Sreedevi
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Copernicus Publications 2024
• Subjects: article; Verlagsveröffentlichung; North Atlantic; North Atlantic oscillation
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5194/piahs-385-163-2024; https://noa.gwlb.de/receive/cop_mods_00073008; https://noa.gwlb.de/servlets/MCRFileNodeServlet/cop_derivate_00071196/piahs-385-163-2024.pdf; https://piahs.copernicus.org/articles/385/163/2024/piahs-385-163-2024.pdf

Global climate changes significantly contribute to increased frequency of hydrologic extremes. This significantly underestimates the hydrologic design parameters, bringing of hydro systems to increased failure risk. In order to address this concern, the current practice of development of hydrologic frequency tools need to be updated accounting for non-stationarity. This study first considered a diverse set of statistical tests to examine the trend, change points, non-stationarity and randomness of streamflow, rainfall and temperature time series of scales ranging from daily to annual. The annual maxima time series indicated non stationarity against the stationary behaviour of daily series of hydro-meteorological datasets of the basin. Subsequently, this study developed the Temperature Duration Frequency (TDF), Rainfall Intensity Duration Frequency (IDF) and Flood Frequency (FF) curves of Greater Pamba river basin in Kerala India, the part of which was most severely affected by the near century return period flood event of 2018. The analysis was performed for a multitude of combinations of variations in distribution parameters with time and climatic drivers as physical covariates in the extreme value formulations. The study proposed a novel wavelet coherence (WC) based driver selection of most dominant combination of climatic precursors in developing FF and IDF relations of three locations of Kalloopara, Malakkara and Thumpamon and TDF curve of Kuttanad region in the basin, considering data of 1985–2015 period. The proposed WC framework considers bi-multi-and partial effects of climatic oscillations (COs) like El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) in identifying potential drivers. The different WC formulations captured in-phase relationships of streamflows and rainfall with COs at intra-annual, annual and inter annual scales up to 4 years. The methods showed that addition of climatic precursors improved the NS ...