Low-flow period seasonality, trends, and climate linkages across the United States

ABSTRACT

Low-flow period properties, including timing, magnitude, and duration, influence many key processes for water resource managers and ecosystems. We computed annual low-flow period duration and timing metrics from 1951 to 2020 for 1032 conterminous United States (CONUS) streamgages and analyzed spatial patterns, trends through time, and relationships to climate. Results show northwestern and eastern CONUS streamgages had longer and more inter-annually consistent low-flow period durations, while central CONUS periods were shorter and more variable. Low-flow periods most often occurred in summer months but start and end dates occurred later in north-central and mountainous western CONUS, which have the greatest number of low flows during cold seasons. Low-flow periods are becoming longer in southeastern and northwestern CONUS but shorter in much of the rest of CONUS. Temperature was correlated with low-flow period duration in southeastern and northwestern CONUS, and precipitation was correlated with duration everywhere, but most strongly in eastern CONUS.

KEYWORDS:

• low flows
• hydrological variability
• trend analysis
• conterminous US
• streamflow

Editor S. Archfield; Associate Editor B. Bonaccorso

Editor S. Archfield; Associate Editor B. Bonaccorso

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Christopher Konrad and two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and edits that improved this article. Any use of trade, firm, or product names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the US government. This research was funded by the US Geological Survey Water Mission Area Drought Program.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

Open Research: All data used in this study are publicly available from Simeone et al. (2023) at https://doi.org/10.5066/P9ZFKCRJ. R code used in this study is available from Simeone (2024) at https://doi.org/10.5066/P94VR71E.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/02626667.2024.2369639