Using hydrological and climatic catchment clusters to explore drivers of catchment behavior
2020
Abstract. The behavior of every catchment is unique. Still, we seek for ways to
classify them as this helps to improve hydrological theories. In this study,
we use hydrological signatures that were recently identified as those with
the highest spatial predictability to cluster 643 catchments from the CAMELS
dataset. We describe the resulting clusters concerning their behavior,
location and attributes. We then analyze the connections between the
resulting clusters and the catchment attributes and relate this to the
co-variability of the catchment attributes in the eastern and western US. To
explore whether the observed differences result from clustering catchments
by either climate or hydrological behavior, we compare the hydrological
clusters to climatic ones. We find that for the overall dataset climate is
the most important factor for the hydrological behavior. However, depending
on the location, either aridity, snow or seasonality has the largest
influence. The clusters derived from the hydrological signatures partly
follow ecoregions in the US and can be grouped into four main behavior
trends. In addition, the clusters show consistent low flow behavior, even
though the hydrological signatures used describe high and mean flows only.
We can also show that most of the catchments in the CAMELS dataset have a
low range of hydrological behaviors, while some more extreme catchments
deviate from that trend. In the comparison of climatic and hydrological
clusters, we see that the widely used Koppen–Geiger climate classification
is not suitable to find hydrologically similar catchments. However, in
comparison with novel, hydrologically based continuous climate
classifications, some clusters follow the climate classification very
directly, while others do not. From those results, we conclude that the
signal of the climatic forcing can be found more explicitly in the behavior
of some catchments than in others. It remains unclear if this is caused by a
higher intra-catchment variability of the climate or a higher influence of
other catchment attributes, overlaying the climate signal. Our findings
suggest that very different sets of catchment attributes and climate can
cause very similar hydrological behavior of catchments – a sort of
equifinality of the catchment response.
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