Flowage Lakes in the World: Analysis of Quantitative Characteristics and Their Effect on the Character of Flow Variations of Lake-Containing Rivers

A joint data repository on flowage lakes of the world and long-term flow variations in the rivers they regulate has been formed. The specific features of the flowage lake parameters have been analyzed along with their dependence on the characteristics of the lakes. A hypothesis has been proposed implying the global invariance of the coefficient of water exchange of lakes with respect to the average volume of flow through the lakes. The effect of the coefficient of lake water exchange on the long-term flow variations of the rivers regulated by the lakes has been studied. It has been shown that an increase in this coefficient is accompanied by a decrease, on the average, of the correlation between the annual, maximal, and minimal flow of successive years, as well as the average orders of the autoregression models describing the long-term variations of all types of flow. The effect of intermittent nonstationarity has been described for the series of annual runoff values for some lake-containing rivers.