Characterising runoff processes for Australia: insights from a parsimonious rainfall-runoff event identification method

Rainfall-runoff events are widely used in hydrological applications, from flood estimation and flood forecasting, to understanding catchment responses in a climate/anthropogenic affected world. The majority of methods used to identify rainfall-runoff events are statistical in nature, relying on subjective, user-defined “rules” (i.e., parameters) that define a rainfall-runoff event. Since no ground-truth information is available to confirm the exact beginning and end of rainfall-runoff events, there is noticeable inconsistency (i.e. uncertainty) within the results. In this study, we propose the Robust Variance-based Event Identification Method (RVEIM), a new parsimonious rainfall-runoff event identification method which uses fewer parameters and better mimics the natural runoff generation process; decreasing the uncertainty in rainfall-runoff event identification. RVEIM detects runoff events by focusing on changes of streamflow variance and pairs to the corresponding rainfall event(s) simultaneously. RVEIM was compared to two benchmarking event identification methods in 8 representative catchments in Australia. A sensitivity analysis was performed using a comprehensive set of plausible event identification parameter values for all methods. Results revealed that the variation of rainfall-runoff events characteristics – including annual number, length, and the mean of paired runoff events – showed limited uncertainty from the RVEIM (standard deviation within ±15 % of the mean across 8 representative Australian catchments). In contrast, the two benchmarking methods exhibited substantially higher uncertainties (43 % to 93 %). Using RVEIM, we present the first comprehensive summary of rainfall-runoff event characteristics across 467 Australian catchments. The distribution of event-scale runoff coefficients for individual catchments shows a strong climate gradient. Such systematic shifts in the distribution of runoff coefficient across climate regions indicate that climate variables play an important role in catchment response and point to potential contrasts in dominating runoff generation mechanisms across climate zones.