Hydrologic alteration along the Middle and Upper East River (Dongjiang) basin, South China: a visually enhanced mining on the results of RVA method

This paper presents a visually enhanced evaluation of the spatio-temporal patterns of the dam-induced hydrologic alteration in the middle and upper East River, south China over 1952–2002, using the range of variability approach (RVA) and visualization package XmdvTool. The impacts of climate variability on hydrological processes have been removed for wet and dry periods, respectively, so that we focus on the impacts of human activities (i.e., dam construction). The results indicate that: (1) along the East River, dams have greatly altered the natural flow regime, range condition and spatial variability; (2) six most remarkable indicators of hydrologic alteration induced by dam-construction are rise rate (1.16), 3-day maximum (0.91), low pulse duration (0.88), January (0.80), July (0.80) and February (0.79) mean flow of the East River during 1952–2002; and (3) spatiotemporal hydrologic alterations are different among three stations along Easter River. Under the influence of dam construction in the upstream, the degree of hydrologic changes from Lingxia, Heyuan to Longchuan station increases. This study reveals that visualization techniques for high-dimensional hydrological datasets together with RVA are beneficial for detecting spatio-temporal hydrologic changes.