José Miguel Delgado

Flood trends and variability in the Mekong river

Annual maximum discharge is analyzed in the Mekong river in Southeast Asia with regard to trends in av- erage flood and trends in variability during the 20th century. Data from four gauging stations downstream of Vientiane, Laos, were used, covering two distinct hydrological regions within the Mekong basin. These time series span through over 70 years and are the longest daily discharge time se- ries available in the region. The methods used, Mann Kendal test (MK), ordinary least squares with resampling (OLS) and non-stationary generalized extreme value function (NS- GEV), are first tested in a Monte Carlo experiment, in or- der to evaluate their detection power in presence of changing variance in the time series. The time series are generated us- ing the generalized extreme value function with varying scale and location parameter. NSGEV outperforms MK and OLS, both because it resulted in less type II errors, but also be- cause it allows for a more complete description of the trends, allowing to separate trends in average and in variability. Results from MK, OLS and NSGEV agreed on trends in average flood behaviour. However, the introduction of a time-varying scale parameter in the NSGEV allowed to iso- late flood variability from the trend in average flood and to have a more complete view of the changes. Overall, results showed an increasing likelihood of extreme floods during the last half of the century, although the probability of an aver- age flood decreased during the same period. A period of en- hanced variance in the last quarter of the 20th century, esti- mated with the wavelet power spectrum as a function of time, was identified, which confirmed the results of the NSGEV. We conclude that the absence of detected positive trends in the hydrological time series was a methodological mis- conception due to over-simplistic models.

Monsoon Variability and the Mekong Flood Regime

The Mekong River in Southeast Asia owes its tidal annual flood regime to the monsoon. But the monsoon is a spatially and temporally variable circulation, with different annual to millennial variability for different regions. We focus on the separation between the Indian and the Western North-Pacific monsoon component to shed light on the interannual flood variability of the Mekong River.