Transfer of hydrologic information among river points

Abstract Concepts of transferable and transferred information are used in transferring hydrologic information between the river points. The former is measured by the square of entropy coefficient and the latter by the square of correlation coefficient. The entropy coefficient measures the maximum transferable information. The transfer of information along rivers has two cases. One case is when the flows of upstream stations pass through downstream stations. These upstream flows are conceived as throughflow, which along with the intermediate flow constitutes the downstream flow. The other case is when the correlation is carried out between upstream flow and the intermediate flow of downstream stations only. Daily flows of three gauging stations of the Esencay River, Turkey, are used for demonstration purpose. Series are further structurally decomposed (original data, trends removed, periodicity removed, stochastic dependence removed), in order to see effects of these characteristics on the transferable and transferred information. Some basic similarities in deterministic components of river flows are the main contributors to transferable and transferred information. The study of lag cross-correlation showed a significant increase in transferred information.