Di Giovanni, A.; Di Curzio, D.; Pantanella, D.; Picchi, C.; Rusi, S. Estimating a Reliable Water Budget at A Basin Scale: A Comparison between the Geostatistical and Traditional Methods (Foro River Basin, Central Italy). Water2023, 15, 4083.
Di Giovanni, A.; Di Curzio, D.; Pantanella, D.; Picchi, C.; Rusi, S. Estimating a Reliable Water Budget at A Basin Scale: A Comparison between the Geostatistical and Traditional Methods (Foro River Basin, Central Italy). Water 2023, 15, 4083.
Di Giovanni, A.; Di Curzio, D.; Pantanella, D.; Picchi, C.; Rusi, S. Estimating a Reliable Water Budget at A Basin Scale: A Comparison between the Geostatistical and Traditional Methods (Foro River Basin, Central Italy). Water2023, 15, 4083.
Di Giovanni, A.; Di Curzio, D.; Pantanella, D.; Picchi, C.; Rusi, S. Estimating a Reliable Water Budget at A Basin Scale: A Comparison between the Geostatistical and Traditional Methods (Foro River Basin, Central Italy). Water 2023, 15, 4083.
Abstract
In the last years, new numerical methods have been applied to weather data for water budget es-timation. Geostatistics is one of the most powerful approaches, when it comes to studying spatially relevant natural phenomena, as it takes into account the spatial correlation among measurements over a specific study area and increases the reliability of the estimation by providing the associate uncertainty. In this study, we tested the feasibility of using a geostatistical method called Ordinary Kriging to provide a reliable estimation of the water budget of the Foro river basin (Periadriatic area, Central Italy), by comparing the obtained results with a more traditional yet robust approach based on the Thiessen polygon spatialization method, considered here as a reference. The spatial estimation with the selected geostatistical and traditional approaches was performed on the av-erage monthly rainfall and temperatures derived from 33-year-long time series measured at the weather station of the regional monitoring network. To transform the spatial variables quantities of both rainfall and air temperature into actual runoff estimates that ideally represent the river dis-charge, we used both the Turc and Thornthwaite methods, considering variable Potential Infiltra-tion Coefficients according to the hydrogeological complexes’ distribution. For the geostatistical method, the same procedure was applied to the 95% confidence interval limits, to quantitatively assess the possible impact of the spatial uncertainty on the estimation of the river discharge. The results obtained by both methods, subsequently converted into monthly discharges, were com-pared to the average monthly discharges related to 33-year-long time series measured at different locations along the Foro river. The results obtained with the geostatistical approach proved to be in line with the ones from the traditional method. Additionally, using the rainfall and temperature values obtained with the Ordinary Kriging and the corresponding confidence interval limits, it was possible to quantify the uncertainty associated with the discharge values, making the estimates more reliable than the ones obtained with the traditional approach. However, the yearly distribu-tion of river discharge obtained by both the geostatistical and traditional methods appeared to be dissimilar to the measured ones. In such anthropized and groundwater-dependent river basins, the surface water use as well as the regulatory effect of the alluvial aquifer regime may affect the river discharge variability over the year and then can account for similar discrepancies between the in-flow and outflow water volumes.
Keywords
water budget; Ordinary Kriging; alluvial basin
Subject
Environmental and Earth Sciences, Water Science and Technology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
