Recession constants are non-stationary: Impacts of multi-annual drought on catchment recession behaviour and storage dynamics

Abstract

Recession analysis is commonly adopted to characterise catchment behaviour, particularly in relation to the role of catchment storage in streamflow production. Recession techniques are data hungry and characterise average behaviour over long periods of recorded data, making them generally unsuitable in transient conditions. Nevertheless, in the context of multi-annual drought, sufficient data may be available to characterise temporal change by examining different subperiods. In this work, we assessed changes in recession behaviour of catchments affected by multi-annual drought in south-eastern Australia, focusing on how changes in recession patterns over time correlate to drought-induced shi..