PERIODIC AUTOREGRESSIVE MODEL APPLIED TO DAILY STREAMFLOW

Periodic models are ideal for modeling hydrological time series. But when applying periodic models to daily flow series, there is a problem of how to make the periodic model “parsimonious”, because it is infeasible to fit a model for each day of the year. Therefore, an approach to periodic modeling is presented which groups the neighboring days based on cluster analysis, then fits an AR model to each group. A periodic model is fitted to the daily streamflow process of the upper Yellow River, and compared with an ARMA model that is fitted to the entire deseasonalized streamflow series.