Determination of the appropriate baseflow separation method for gauging stations on the two lowland rivers in Croatia

The estimation of baseflow is one of the essential tasks in water resources management and hydrologic research to assess the impacts of climate change and to describe and predict flood events based on the flood hydrograph characteristics (peak flow, duration and volume). Several methods have been developed to separate baseflow from direct flow, and in recent years they have been automated through the use of available R packages. In this work R programming language packages “EcoHydRology” and “lfstat” were used to separate baseflow from direct flow on the historical daily discharge time series of the several gauging stations on the two large lowland rivers in Croatia: the Sava River and the Drava River. The aim of this study is to determine the appropriate baseflow separation method for gauging stations on Sava River and Drava River in order to evaluate the baseflow separation method for future multivariate analysis of flood events under the R3PEAT project (www.grad.hr/r3peat) that explores pier scour development next to the bridges crossing large rivers in Croatia with installed scour countermeasures.