Techniques for assessing the climatic sensitivity of river flow regimes

摘要: Regimes are useful tools for characterizing the seasonal behaviour of river flow and other hydroclimatological variables over an annual cycle (hydrological year). This paper develops tests: (i) a regime classification method to identify spatial temporal patterns in intraannual response; (ii) novel sensitivity index (SI )t o assess regimes’ climatic sensitivity. The shape (form) magnitude considers whole rather than isolating single month or season analysis, which has been common approach previous studies. is particularly identifying large-scale regimes their between-year stability, thus providing context short-term, small-scale process-based research. SI provides means assessing often-complex linkages between drivers flow, as it identifies strength direction associations classifications climate regimes. potential application problems where relationships nominal require be found. These techniques evaluated by test data set air temperature rainfall time-series (1974–1999) sample 35 UK basins. results support current knowledge about hydroclimatology UK. Although this research does not seek yield new, detailed physical process understanding, perspective at large scales upon quantifies linkages. Having clearly demonstrated effective environment relatively well known, there appears much gain from applying these parts world hydrology poorly understood. Copyright  2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.