Generation of 10-day flow of the Brahmaputra River using a time series model

Abstract

Time series models are used in hydrology for the generation of river flow data. The development of such a model, namely deseasonalized Autoregressive Moving Average (ARMA), for the generation of 10-day flows of the Brahmaputra River in Bangladesh is described. The model was fitted following systematic stages of identification, estimation and diagnostic checking of model building. A negative power transformation for the Brahmaputra flow was found to be necessary for model construction. The seasonality of the flow was removed by Fourier analysis using five harmonics for 10-day means and 13 harmonics for standard deviations. The fitted model was ARMA (1, 3) having one autoregressive parameter and three moving average parameters. The validation forecasts made with the model indicated that the deseasonalized ARMA model could capture the 10-day variability of the Brahmaputra flow reasonably well. To further validate and verify the model 200 synthetic flow sequences, each with a length of 50 years, were generated. The fitted ARMA model was found to be capable of preserving both short-term statistics (variance and autocorrelation) and long-term statistics (Hurst coefficient and rescaled adjusted range) of the historic Brahmaputra flow.