Changes in runoff and eco-flow in the Dongjiang River of the Pearl River Basin, China

Abstract

The Dongjiang River, one of the tributaries of the Pearl River, serves as the critical water source for Guangdong Province and the District of Hong Kong in China. In this study, the change trend and change points of flow at three main gaging stations in the Dongjiang River were analyzed using the nonparametric Mann-Kendall test and Pettitt-Mann-Whitney change-point statistics. Flow regime changes in the Dongjiang River were quantified by using both the Indicators of Hydrologic Alteration (IHA) parameters and eco-statistics, such as ecosurplus and ecodeficit. It was found that the change trend for annual median flow in the Dongjiang River increased over the past 60 years, with the major change occurring sometime between 1970 and 1974. IHA analyses showed that the magnitude of monthly flow decreased during the flood period, but increased greatly during the dry period. The median date of the one-day minimum flow moved ahead, and the duration of low pulse for the Dongjiang River was reduced significantly because of reservoir construction and operations. The IHA-based Dundee Hydrological Regime Alteration Method analysis indicated that all three stations have experienced a moderate risk of impact since 1974. The eco-statistical analyses showed that the majority of the flows appeared to be ecosurplus at all three locations after 1974, while flows with less than 30%, or higher exceedance probability, had ecodeficit in the summer flood period due to heavy reservoir operations.

Keywords

hydrologic alteration / change point analysis / runoff / eco-flow

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Acknowledgment

The authors would like to express their sincere gratitude to two anonymous referees for their constructive comments and useful suggestions that helped us improve our paper. We also want to thank Lisa Shepherd from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for editing. This study was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51379223 and 51210013), the Pearl-River-New-Star of Science and Technology supported by Guangzhou City (2011J2200051), and the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (S2011010001549).

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2014 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg