Global streamflows - Part 2: Reservoir storage-yield performance

Abstract

This is the second of three papers describing hydrologic analyses of monthly and annual streamflow data for a global set of 729 unregulated rivers with at least 25 years of continuous data. Capacity estimates of hypothetical reservoirs are computed for each river using the Sequent Peak Algorithm (SPA), Behaviour analysis and the Gould-Dincer Gamma procedure. Based on SPA and Behaviour procedures, empirical relationships relating reservoir capacity and yield were developed which accounted for 87-96% of the variance in capacity estimates across the global data set of monthly streamflows. The theoretical Gould-Dincer Gamma procedure was also shown to be a suitable technique to estimate reservoi..