Weekly and monthly flows in synthetic hydrology

A nonstationary model for synthesizing weekly flow patterns, such that means, variances, and covariances of weekly and monthly flows, as estimated from historical records, will be preserved under the assumption of a Markov structure for monthly flows, is developed and applied to the Haw River in North Carolina. Analyses show excellent agreement between statistics of the historical record and those of the simulated record when weekly flows were assumed to follow a log normal distribution. A moving average process is used to reduce sampling errors of parameter estimates from the historical record.