CSDMS 2013 annual meeting poster Ben Hudson
Model-Assisted River Discharge Estimates
Abstract:
Often a rivers discharge is calculated by constructing an empirical relationship between concurrent, direct measurements of river stage and discharge. In many remote parts of the world however technical and logistical challenges make building of such relationships difficult.
We test and present an alternative approach for use in remote Greenlandic Rivers. We used in-situ stage observations, but converted these measurements into estimates of discharge using a fluid mechanically based model (Kean and Smith, 2005; Kean et al., 2009; Kean and Smith, 2010). We first tested this approach against the one river in Greenland with a well-developed empirical stage- discharge relationship. Modeled relationships agreed well with the empirically derived relationship. We then used this same technique to aid in estimating discharge on two additional rivers in Greenland where only stage measurements were available. This technique presents an alternative option when other methods are logistically prohibitive. In the future this approach may also be useful to aid in estimating river discharge from space.
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