Low–flow parameters in relation to specific soil types and geology through long–term hydrological analysis

Low flow is related to the soil and geological conditions in a basin as well as rainfall, basin scale, and topography. Nonlinearity of runoff was originally described by Horton (1936) as a storage–discharge relationship, which is now used in many hydrological models for various purposes such as water resources planning and the assessment of projections of climate change impact on runoff. The storage–discharge relationship was represented in the form of Q=K^NS^N by Ding (2011). The constant K was already considered in the recession coefficient of groundwater runoff by Ando et al. (1983). The relationship between K and N was indicated as an inversely proportional equation by Fujimura et al. (2016) who carried out a sensitivity analysis. Although the understanding of the storage–discharge equation has been developed, the uncertainties of the parameters have not been resolved. To reduce the uncertainties of the parameters and improve the accuracy of hydrological models, it is important to clarify how natural factors in a basin, such as soil and geology, affect the parameters in the hydrological models. Therefore, we aim to investigate the statistical correlations between the recession constant K and the coverage rates of specific soil types and the geology in a basin.

The nine basins selected for this study are located in mountainous regions in Japan with different topographical, geological, and climatological conditions. The basin areas range from 103 to 332km². Rainfall and runoff data were downloaded from databases of the Water Information System of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and the Automated Meteorological Data Acquisition System (AMeDAS) of the Meteorological Agency, respectively. The specific soil types and geological information (specific geological time and rock formations) of 1:200000 scale were obtained from databases of the Japan soil inventory of the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization (NARO) and of the Seamless Digital Geological Map of Japan of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), respectively. The conceptual hydrological model for mountainous basins developed by Fujimura et al. (2011) was applied for a period of more than 15 years at hourly time steps to optimize the recession constant K for each study basin.

The results indicate that the recession coefficient K has correlations and significant differences (significance level alpha of 0.05) with the coverage rates of (a) Brown forest soils (p value of 0.00026), (b) Neogene rock formation (p value of 0.0049), and (c) Andosols / Volcanic rock formation ratio (p value of 0.012). The Andosols formation depends essentially on human activity as well as volcanic ash. The volcanic ash and volcanic rock might have been produced in the same geological time. To show the effect of human activity and other environmental factors, the area of Andosols is divided by the area of volcanic rock.