Theoretical and empirical evidence against the  Budyko catchment trajectory conjecture

Reaver, Nathan G. F.; Kaplan, David A.; Klammler, Harald; Jawitz, James W.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-26-1507-2022

Articles | Volume 26, issue 5

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-26-1507-2022

© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-26-1507-2022

© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 26, issue 5

Research article

|

18 Mar 2022

Research article |

| 18 Mar 2022

Theoretical and empirical evidence against the Budyko catchment trajectory conjecture

Nathan G. F. Reaver, David A. Kaplan, Harald Klammler, and James W. Jawitz

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-26-1507-2022-supplement

Data sets

Catchment attributes and hydro-meteorological timeseries for 671 catchments across Great Britain (CAMELS-GB) G. Coxon, N. Addor, J. P. Bloomfield, J. Freer, M. Fry, J. Hannaford, N. J. K. Howden, R. Lane, M. Lewis, E. L. Robinson, T. Wagener, and R. Woods https://doi.org/10.5285/8344e4f3-d2ea-44f5-8afa-86d2987543a9

Designation and trend analysis of the updated UK Benchmark Network of river flow stations: the UKBN2 dataset (https://nrfa.ceh.ac.uk/benchmark-network, http://nrfa.ceh.ac.uk/sites/default/files/UKBN_Station_List_vUKBN2.0_1.xlsx) S. Harrigan, J. Hannaford, K. Muchan, and T. J. Marsh https://doi.org/10.2166/nh.2017.058

Short summary

The Budyko curve emerges globally from the behavior of multiple catchments. Single-parameter Budyko equations extrapolate the curve concept to individual catchments, interpreting curves and parameters as representing climatic and biophysical impacts on water availability, respectively. We tested these two key components theoretically and empirically, finding that catchments are not required to follow Budyko curves and usually do not, implying the parametric framework lacks predictive ability.