Monthly flow indicators can be used to infer daily stream flow behaviour across Australia

Abstract

Flow indicators based on daily flow data are commonly used to characterize the hydrologic regimes of rivers and to investigate links between flow and ecological condition. Discharge data measured at a daily timestep is considered essential for such investigations because there is an underlying premise that longer timesteps (e.g. monthly) are not suitable for capturing the variability in flow behaviour of most relevance to ecologically important processes. This paper investigates this assumption by examining the information content of daily and monthly streamflow data for a diversity of perennial, intermittent and ephemeral flow regimes across Australia, using a novel approach of comparing da..