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| Titel |
Characterizing hydrologic change through catchment classification |
| VerfasserIn |
K. A. Sawicz, C. Kelleher, T. Wagener, P. Troch, M. Sivapalan  , G. Carrillo |
| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| ISSN |
1027-5606
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| Digitales Dokument |
URL |
| Erschienen |
In: Hydrology and Earth System Sciences ; 18, no. 1 ; Nr. 18, no. 1 (2014-01-22), S.273-285 |
| Datensatznummer |
250120257
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| Publikation (Nr.) |
 copernicus.org/hess-18-273-2014.pdf |
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| Zusammenfassung |
| There has been an intensive search in recent years for suitable strategies to organize and
classify the very heterogeneous group of catchments that characterize our
landscape. One strand of this work has focused on testing
the value of hydrological signatures derived from widely available
hydro-meteorological observations for this catchment classification effort.
Here we extend this effort by organizing 314 catchments across the
contiguous US into 12 distinct clusters using six signature
characteristics for a baseline decade (1948–1958, period 1). We subsequently
develop a regression tree and utilize it to classify these catchments for
three subsequent decades (periods 2–4). This analysis allows us to assess
the movement of catchments between clusters over time, and therefore to assess
whether their hydrologic similarity/dissimilarity changes. We find examples
in which catchments initially assigned to a single class diverge into
multiple classes (e.g., midwestern catchments between periods 1 and 2), but also
cases where catchments from different classes would converge into a single
class (e.g., midwestern catchments between periods 2 and 3). We attempt to
interpret the observed changes for causes of this temporal variability in
hydrologic behavior. Generally, the changes in both directions were most
strongly controlled by changes in the water balance of catchments
characterized by an aridity index close to one. Changes to climate
characteristics of catchments – mean annual precipitation, length of cold
season or the seasonality of precipitation throughout the year – seem to
explain most of the observed class transitions between slightly
water-limited and slightly energy-limited states. Inadequate temporal
information on other time-varying aspects, such as land use change, limits
our ability to further disentangle causes for change. |
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