Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-16-2018

Publication Title

Hydrology

Volume

5

Issue

2

First page number:

1

Last page number:

24

Abstract

Understanding the interconnections between oceanic-atmospheric climate variables and regional streamflow of the conterminous United States may aid in improving regional long lead-time streamflow forecasting. The current research evaluates the time-lagged relationship between streamflow of six geographical regions defined from National Climate Assessment and sea surface temperature (SST), 500-mbar geopotential height (Z500), 500-mbar specific humidity (SH500), and 500-mbar east-west wind (U500) of the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean using singular value decomposition (SVD). The spatio-temporal correlation between streamflow and SST was developed first from SVD and thus obtained correlation was later associated with Z500, SH500, and U500 separately to evaluate the coupled interconnections between the climate variables. Furthermore, the associations between regional streamflow and the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation were evaluated using the derivatives of continuous wavelet transform. Regional SVD analysis revealed significant teleconnection between several regions and climate variables. The warm phase of equatorial SST had shown a stronger correlation with the majority of streamflow. Both SVD and wavelet analyses concluded that the streamflow variability of the regions in close proximity to the Pacific Ocean was strongly associated with the ENSO. Improved knowledge of teleconnection of climate variables with regional streamflow variability may help in regional water management and streamflow prediction studies.

Keywords

Streamflow; Singular value decomposition; Wavelet; Oceanic-oscillations; Climate change

Disciplines

Hydrology

File Format

application/pdf

File Size

6.603 Kb

Language

English

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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