A novel Joint Probability Density Difference Approach for assessing the alteration of hydrologic regime

The construction and operation of upstream reservoirs have significantly altered downstream hydrologic regime. Appropriate and quantifiable assessment method for the alteration of hydrologic regime is considerably vital and emergent for ecological protection and restoration. The Range of Variability Approach (RVA) and modified RVA methods have been widely used in practice to assess the hydrological alteration. However, these methods have failed to concurrently describe the distribution of indicator and morphological features in detail, which might inevitably lead to the misjudgment of alteration. This paper proposes a Joint Probability Density Difference Approach (JPDDA) method to address the major drawbacks of these previous methods with the introduction of Gaussian Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) and copula function. The annual average flow is selected as the reference variable to construct a proper joint probability density function between itself and other hydrological alteration indicators. The JPDDA method could describe the marginal distribution in detail through Gaussian KDE and also link the morphological features with copula function. Along with pervious methods, the hydrological alterations at Yichang hydrological station, Yangtze River are estimated based on the measured flow from 1949 to 2022. It is shown that the hydrologic regime has suffered from a moderate or even heavy alteration under the influence of massive upstream cascade reservoirs, and the JPDDA outperforms the other methods in terms of rationality and stability for practical assessments. Thus, the proposed JPDDA method is strongly advised to handle the hydrological alteration and could provide a reasonable reference for ecological operation.