the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Landscape structure and rainstorms swing the response of recession nonlinearity
Jun-Yi Lee
Ci-Jian Yang
Tsung-Ren Peng
Tsung-Yu Lee
Abstract. Streamflow recession discloses hydrological functioning, runoff dynamics, and storage status within catchments. Understanding recession response to landscape structure and rainstorms can be a guidance for assessing streamflow change under climate change. Yet, the documented response direction of recession is inconsistent and diverse. This study tested how landscape structure and rainstorms regulate the response direction. We derived recession rate, a, and nonlinearity, b, from power-law recession (-dQ/dt = aQb) in 19 subtropical catchments with a broad spectrum of 260 rainstorms. Results showed that the recession rate increases with the drainage density and L / G ratio (flow-path length over gradient), indicating that the catchments with the dense network or more short-and-gentle hillslopes would result in high rates. Apart from landscape structure, the rate surprisingly decreases with rainstorm amount. Probably because rainstorm facilitates connectivity in the saturated zones, which might conjoin more water from slow reservoirs and thus water drains slowly. Additionally, the recession nonlinearity increases with spatial heterogeneity (drainage area) but decreases with hillslope hydraulics (drainage density). The swing of response direction, which lies in the predominance between spatial heterogeneity and hillslope hydraulics, needs further clarification, particularly for regional recession assessment under climate changes. Incorrect response direction from landscape structure would lead to considerable bias inference.
- Preprint
(2382 KB) - Metadata XML
-
Supplement
(177 KB) - BibTeX
- EndNote
Jun-Yi Lee et al.
Status: final response (author comments only)
-
RC1: 'Comment on hess-2022-88', Anonymous Referee #1, 04 May 2022
The comment was uploaded in the form of a supplement: https://hess.copernicus.org/preprints/hess-2022-88/hess-2022-88-RC1-supplement.pdf
- AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Jr-Chuan Huang, 26 Oct 2022
-
RC2: 'Review of hess-2022-88', Anonymous Referee #2, 16 Aug 2022
This overall well written paper intends to relate the classical a and b recession parameters to stream network, rainfall and antecedent moisture conditions. As discussed in the review by Anonymous Referee #1, there is a methodological problem: the presented analysis investigates the relationship between the marginal distributions of the parameters and possible explanatory variables, i.e. the analysis omits that a and be are not independent; a solution would be to first model the relation between a and b but as far as I see from fig. 5, there is no evident  relationship between a and b.
Besides, it is unclear what the main contribution of the paper is beyond a state-of-the-art case study (which is probably no enough to justify publication in HESS). A clear presentation of what we could learn from a case study in the selected hydroclimatic area would be of key importance. The paper would also strongly benefit from a concise synthesis of known factors influencing recession properties and a better justified selection of the potential explanatory variables that are retained.
For all above reasons, I suggest rejecting the paper.
Detailed comments:
- There is a lack of references for the theoretical aspects of how recession properties depend on landscape properties
- There is no discussion of active drainage density (the actual drainage network can vary strongly seasonally)
- the literature review should be improved; the previous findings are summarized but not yet synthesized; we also do not know where the previous work has been done (catchments size, climate, region etc); is this study the first in a tropical area?
- When talking about travel times, it is important to be more specific wether this is in the channeled or the unchannelled state (i.e. in-stream or in the hillslopes), (e.g. Rinaldo et al., 2006)
- 1: attention some units are wrong, the same units should be on both sides of the equation
- There are not enough details on how the explanatory variables of Table 1 are computed for the 260 events (what is total precip, what is Qtot (including or excluding baseflow?), how is peak flow identified if there are several peaks etc. etc.)
Â
- Rinaldo, A., Botter, G., Bertuzzo, E., Uccelli, A., Settin, T., and Marani, M.: Transport at basin scales: 1. Theoretical framework, Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 10, 19-29, 2006.
- Â
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-2022-88-RC2 - AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Jr-Chuan Huang, 26 Oct 2022
Jun-Yi Lee et al.
Jun-Yi Lee et al.
Viewed
HTML | XML | Total | Supplement | BibTeX | EndNote | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
409 | 114 | 24 | 547 | 54 | 12 | 10 |
- HTML: 409
- PDF: 114
- XML: 24
- Total: 547
- Supplement: 54
- BibTeX: 12
- EndNote: 10
Viewed (geographical distribution)
Country | # | Views | % |
---|
Total: | 0 |
HTML: | 0 |
PDF: | 0 |
XML: | 0 |
- 1