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Climate change undermines a basic assumption that historically has facilitated management of water supplies, demands, and risks.
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The U.S. Geological Survey evaluated 20 years of total phosphorus (P) and total nitrogen (N) concentration data for 18 Lake Champlain tributaries using a new statistical method based on weighted regressions to estimate daily concentration and flux histories based on discharge, season, and trend as explanatory variables. The use of all the streamflow discharge values for a given date in the record, in a process called “flow-normalization”, removed the year-to-year variation due to streamflow and generated a smooth time series from which trends were calculated. This approach to data analysis can be of great value to evaluations of the success of restoration efforts because it filters out the large random fluctuations...
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Changes in nitrate concentration and flux between 1980 and 2008 at eight sites in the Mississippi River basin were determined using a new statistical method that accommodates evolving nitrate behavior over time and produces flow-normalized estimates of nitrate concentration and flux that are independent of random variations in streamflow. The results show that little consistent progress has been made in reducing riverine nitrate since 1980, and that flow-normalized concentration and flux are increasing in some areas. Flow-normalized nitrate concentration and flux increased between 9 and 76% at four sites on the Mississippi River and a tributary site on the Missouri River, but changed very little at tributary sites...
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Human activities that may affect the flow of water through river systems include diversion of water from one river basin to another, creation of artificial reservoir storage, destruction of natural wetland storage, and land changes that alter rates of erosion, infiltration, overland flow, or evapotranspiration. The effects of these human actions influence not only long-term average flows, but the magnitude and frequency of droughts and floods and year-to-year and season-to-season flow variations. These effects, in turn, have a variety of direct effects on man, related to availability of reliable water supplies for in-stream and withdrawal uses and to magnitude and frequency of flood damages. They also affect geomorphic...
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Hirsch, Robert M., 2011. A Perspective on Nonstationarity and Water Management. Journal of the American Water Resources Association (JAWRA) 47(3):436-446. DOI: 10.1111/j.1752-1688.2011.00539.xAbstract: This essay offers some perspectives on climate-related nonstationarity and water resources. Hydrologists must not lose sight of the many sources of nonstationarity, recognizing that many of them may be of much greater magnitude than those that may arise from climate change. It is paradoxical that statistical and deterministic approaches give us better insights about changes in mean conditions than about the tails of probability distributions, and yet the tails are very important to water management. Another paradox...
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