Author(s): B. P. Neal; S. Lang; S. Treadwell
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Keywords: Environmental flows; Water resource modelling
Abstract: Environmental flow recommendations are typically specified on a daily time step, whereas some water resource models used to support water management and planning operate on a monthly time step. This paper assesses the ability to reliably determine whether daily environmental flow recommendations are being met using only monthly streamflow data. A case study is presented from southern Victoria, Australia. The outcome from this case study was that short duration cease to flow events and low flow freshes were difficult to reliably assess using monthly data, but minimum baseflows, high flow freshes, bankfull and overbank flows could be more reliably assessed. Where there was a difference between the assessments on daily and monthly time steps for freshes, the assessment on a monthly time step almost always overestimated the proportion of months that the given event was actually being delivered. The outcomes of this paper will help ecologists to interpret monthly water resource model output in the period until those models are converted to a daily time step in the future.
Year: 2011