Articles | Volume 26, issue 23
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-26-6073-2022
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-26-6073-2022
Research article
 | 
06 Dec 2022
Research article |  | 06 Dec 2022

Explaining changes in rainfall–runoff relationships during and after Australia's Millennium Drought: a community perspective

Keirnan Fowler, Murray Peel, Margarita Saft, Tim J. Peterson, Andrew Western, Lawrence Band, Cuan Petheram, Sandra Dharmadi, Kim Seong Tan, Lu Zhang, Patrick Lane, Anthony Kiem, Lucy Marshall, Anne Griebel, Belinda E. Medlyn, Dongryeol Ryu, Giancarlo Bonotto, Conrad Wasko, Anna Ukkola, Clare Stephens, Andrew Frost, Hansini Gardiya Weligamage, Patricia Saco, Hongxing Zheng, Francis Chiew, Edoardo Daly, Glen Walker, R. Willem Vervoort, Justin Hughes, Luca Trotter, Brad Neal, Ian Cartwright, and Rory Nathan

Data sets

CAMELS-AUS v1: Hydrometeorological time series and landscape attributes for 222 catchments in Australia K. Fowler, S. C. Acharya, N. Addor, C. Chou, and M. Peel https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.921850

Australia's plantations 2016 ABARES (Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences) https://www.awe.gov.au/abares/forestsaustralia/forest-data-maps-and-tools/spatial-data/australias-plantations

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Short summary
Recently, we have seen multi-year droughts tending to cause shifts in the relationship between rainfall and streamflow. In shifted catchments that have not recovered, an average rainfall year produces less streamflow today than it did pre-drought. We take a multi-disciplinary approach to understand why these shifts occur, focusing on Australia's over-10-year Millennium Drought. We evaluate multiple hypotheses against evidence, with particular focus on the key role of groundwater processes.