Abstract
This paper presents a visually enhanced evaluation of the spatio-temporal patterns of the dam-induced hydrologic alteration in the middle and upper East River, south China over 1952–2002, using the range of variability approach (RVA) and visualization package XmdvTool. The impacts of climate variability on hydrological processes have been removed for wet and dry periods, respectively, so that we focus on the impacts of human activities (i.e., dam construction). The results indicate that: (1) along the East River, dams have greatly altered the natural flow regime, range condition and spatial variability; (2) six most remarkable indicators of hydrologic alteration induced by dam-construction are rise rate (1.16), 3-day maximum (0.91), low pulse duration (0.88), January (0.80), July (0.80) and February (0.79) mean flow of the East River during 1952–2002; and (3) spatiotemporal hydrologic alterations are different among three stations along Easter River. Under the influence of dam construction in the upstream, the degree of hydrologic changes from Lingxia, Heyuan to Longchuan station increases. This study reveals that visualization techniques for high-dimensional hydrological datasets together with RVA are beneficial for detecting spatio-temporal hydrologic changes.
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Acknowledgments
The work described in this paper was supported by a key grant from the Chinese Ministry of Education (308012), key grant from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (40830639), a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (CUHK4627/05H), an open research grant from the Key Sediment Lab of the Ministry for Water Resources (2008001), a National Key Technology R&D Program (2007BAC03A060301), and the Program of Introducing Talents of Discipline to Universities—the 111 Project of Hohai University (B08048). Cordial thanks should be extended to the Nature Conservancy, USA for the ‘Indicators of Hydrologic Alteration’ (IHA) software used in RVA computation, the XmdvTool for visualization of high-dimensional hydro-data developed by The University of California, Davis, and the Department of Water Resources and Environment, Sun Yat-sen University for providing hydrologic data of study area. Prof. V. P. Singh from Texas A&M University has kindly read and improved the quality of the final version of the paper.
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Chen, Y.D., Yang, T., Xu, CY. et al. Hydrologic alteration along the Middle and Upper East River (Dongjiang) basin, South China: a visually enhanced mining on the results of RVA method. Stoch Environ Res Risk Assess 24, 9–18 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00477-008-0294-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00477-008-0294-7