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Summary: In this paper, the trends of the annual streamflow and precipitation and cross correlations between them were analyzed in nine large river basins of China during 1956–2005. The results indicate that: (1) the annual mean streamflow decreases in arid and semi-arid regions of north China; however, increasing trends occur in south and Southwest China; (2) the annual streamflow and precipitation exhibit reasonable correlation in nine large river basins except those located in inland areas. The annual streamflow over most areas of China is fed by precipitation; however, the decline in streamflow is faster than the decreases of precipitation since 1970s in the arid and semi-arid regions of north China. The relationship between the annual precipitation and streamflow presents a non-stationary state in north China. This non-stationary relationship is strongly influenced by both human activities and precipitation changes; (3) a significant increase of water use might be the major factor responsible for the steeper decline in streamflow than in precipitation in Haihe River, Yellow River and Songliao River basins in north China. In inland river areas, increase of water use and actual evapotranspiration might result in decline in streamflow although precipitation has an increase tendency. This paper sheds light on the non-stationary relationship between annual precipitation and streamflow and possible underlying causes, which will be helpful for a better understanding of the changes of precipitation and streamflow in China at large scale and in other regions of the world. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper advances the physical understanding of the flow duration curve (FDC) regional variation. It provides a process-based analysis of the interaction between climate and landscape properties to explain disparities in FDC shapes. We used (i) long term measured flow and precipitation data over 73 catchments from the eastern US. (ii) We calibrated the Sacramento model (SAC-SMA) to simulate soil moisture and flow components FDCs. The catchments classification based on storm characteristics pointed to the effect of catchments landscape properties on the precipitation variability and consequently on the FDC shapes. The landscape properties effect was pronounce such that low value of the slope of FDC (SFDC)—hinting at limited flow variability—were present in regions of high precipitation variability. Whereas, in regions with low precipitation variability the SFDCs were of larger values. The topographic index distribution, at the catchment scale, indicated that saturation excess overland flow mitigated the flow variability under conditions of low elevations with large soil moisture storage capacity and high infiltration rates. The SFDCs increased due to the predominant subsurface stormflow in catchments at high elevations with limited soil moisture storage capacity and low infiltration rates. Our analyses also highlighted the major role of soil infiltration rates on the FDC despite the impact of the predominant runoff generation mechanism and catchment elevation. In conditions of slow infiltration rates in soils of large moisture storage capacity (at low elevations) and predominant saturation excess, the SFDCs were of larger values. On the other hand, the SFDCs decreased in catchments of prevalent subsurface stormflow and poorly drained soils of small soil moisture storage capacity. The analysis of the flow components FDCs demonstrated that the interflow contribution to the response was the higher in catchments with large value of slope of the FDC. The surface flow FDC was the most affected by the precipitation as it tracked the precipitation duration curve (PDC). In catchments with low SFDCs, this became less applicable as surface flow FDC diverged from PDC at the upper tail (> 40% of the flow percentile). The interflow and baseflow FDCs illustrated most the filtering effect on the precipitation. The process understanding we achieved in this study is key for flow simulation and assessment in addition to future works focusing on process-based FDC predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary The multisensor Quantitative Precipitation Estimates (MQPEs) created by the US National Weather Service (NWS) are subject to a non-stationary bias. This paper quantifies the impacts of climatological adjustment of MQPEs alone, as well as the compound impacts of adjustment and model calibration, on the accuracy of simulated flood peak magnitude and that in detecting flood events. Our investigation is based on 19 watersheds in the mid-Atlantic region of US, which are grouped into small (<500 km 2 ) and large (>500 km 2 ) watersheds. NWS archival MQPEs over 1997–2013 for this region are adjusted to match concurrent gauge-based monthly precipitation accumulations. Then raw and adjusted MQPEs serve as inputs to the NWS distributed hydrologic model-threshold frequency framework (DHM-TF). Two experiments via DHM-TF are performed. The first one examines the impacts of adjustment alone through uncalibrated model simulations, whereas the second one focuses on the compound effects of adjustment and calibration on the detection of flood events. Uncalibrated model simulations show broad underestimation of flood peaks for small watersheds and overestimation those for large watersheds. Prior to calibration, adjustment alone tends to reduce the magnitude of simulated flood peaks for small and large basins alike, with 95% of all watersheds experienced decline over 2004–2013. A consequence is that a majority of small watersheds experience no improvement, or deterioration in bias (0% of basins experiencing improvement). By contrast, most (73%) of larger ones exhibit improved bias. Outcomes of the detection experiment show that the role of adjustment is not diminished by calibration for small watersheds, with only 25% of which exhibiting reduced bias after adjustment with calibrated parameters. Furthermore, it is shown that calibration is relatively effective in reducing false alarms (e.g., false alarm rate is down from 0.28 to 0.19 after calibration for small watersheds with calibrated parameters); but its impacts on detection rate are mixed. As an example, the detection rate of 2-Y events in fact declines for small watersheds after calibration is performed (from 0.4 to 0.28, and from 0.28 to 0.19 with raw and adjusted MQPE, respectively). These mixed outcomes underscore the complex interplays between errors in MQPEs, conditional bias in the reference gauge-based analysis, and structural deficiencies of the hydrologic model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary The climate elasticity of runoff is an important indicator that is used to quantify the relationship between changes in runoff and changes in climate variables. It is a function of both climate and catchment characteristics. Recently, Yang and Yang (2011) proposed an analytical derivation of climate elasticity (YY2011), in which a parameter n was used to represent the impact of the catchment characteristics. In China, both climate and catchment characteristics have large spatial variations. To understand the spatial variation of hydrologic response to climate change, this paper divided China into 210 catchments, further calculated the parameter n , and then estimated the climate elasticity and evaluated the contribution of climate change to runoff for each catchment. The results show that n ranges from 0.4 to 3.8 (with a mean of 1.3 and a standard deviation of 0.6), which has a logarithmic relationship with catchment slope; the precipitation elasticity ranges from 1.1 to 4.8 (with a mean of 1.9 and a standard deviation of 0.6), which shows a large regional variation, smaller values (1.1–2.0) mainly appearing in Southern China, the Songhua River basin and the Northwest, and larger values (2.1–4.8) mainly appearing in the Hai River basin, the Liao River basin and the Yellow River basin. In addition, climate contribution to runoff exhibits a large regional variation, the largest positive values (1.1–3.1%/a) occurring in the Northwest, the largest negative values (−1.0 to −0.5%/a) occurring in the Hai River basin and the middle reach of the Yellow River basin. In theory, the YY2011 method is a first-order approximation. The approximation underestimates the precipitation ( P ) contribution to runoff when P increases and overestimates that when P decreases, and the relative error has a median of ∼3% and a maximum of ∼20% when 10% precipitations change in those catchments of China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]