EGU21-9468
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-9468
EGU General Assembly 2021
© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Location, location, location – Considering local neighborhood when analyzing large samples of UK catchments

Melike Kiraz1, Thorsten Wagener1,3, and Gemma Coxon2
Melike Kiraz et al.
  • 1University of Bristol, Civil Engineering, Bristol, United Kingdom of Great Britain – England, Scotland, Wales
  • 2University of Bristol, School of Geographical Sciences, Bristol, United Kingdom of Great Britain – England, Scotland, Wales
  • 3University of Potsdam, Hydrologic Systems, Potsdam, Germany

Studying large samples of catchments has been an effective means for comparative hydrology as it provides a wide range of hydrological conditions which can be used to learn similarities and differences between places. Such analyses typically include an attempt to organize catchments along some gradient (e.g. climate) or in clusters (e.g. geology) using catchment descriptors (e.g. an aridity index). Various past studies have pointed to the problem that available catchment descriptors are often not sufficient to capture hydrologically relevant catchment behaviours. It is further widely acknowledged that the water balance of many catchments is not closed. Several hypotheses for the causes of this lack of closed water balance are stated in literature.

If we assume that the dominant control on water balance is climate, then catchments’ water balances should change smoothly in space (since the climate varies smoothly). If they do not, then something else must be controlling this behaviour. We expect that size, location and geology might play important role in the water balances of UK catchments. We aim to study the differences in water balance between catchments to understand the role of catchment location. We test different hypotheses while considering the local neighborhood of 669 UK catchments from the CAMELS-GB dataset.

How to cite: Kiraz, M., Wagener, T., and Coxon, G.: Location, location, location – Considering local neighborhood when analyzing large samples of UK catchments, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-9468, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-9468, 2021.

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