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Streamflow and Hydrological Drought Trend Analysis and Forecasting in Cyprus

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Abstract

The persistent water shortage in Cyprus has been alleviated by importing freshwater from neighbouring countries, and severe droughts have been met with financial reimbursement from the EU at least twice. The goal of this research is to investigate and perform short-term forecasting of both streamflow and hydrological drought trends over the island. Eleven hydrometric stations with a 34-year common record length of the mean daily discharge from 10/1979 to 09/2013 are used for this purpose, with the relevant upstream catchments considered to represent pristine conditions. The Streamflow Drought Index (SDI) successfully captures the hydrological drought conditions over the island, and the performance of the index is validated based on both the historic drought archives and results from other drought indices for the island. The Mann–Kendall (M-K) test reveals that the annual and seasonal time series of the discharge volumes always illustrate a decreasing but insignificant trend at a significance level of a = 0.05; additionally, the decrease per decade in the average annual streamflow volume based on Sen’s slope statistic is approximately −9.4%. The M-K test on the SDI reveals that drought conditions intensified with time. Ten autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models are built and used to forecast the mean monthly streamflow values with moderate accuracy; the best ARIMA forecast model in each catchment is derived by comparing two model-performance statistical measures for the different (p,d,q) model parameters. The predicted discharge values are processed by the SDI-3 index, revealing that non-drought conditions are expected in most catchments in the upcoming three months, although mild-drought conditions are anticipated for catchments 7, 8 and 9.

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Acknowledgements

A portion of this research was conducted during the Erasmus + International Staff Mobility for Training mission of D. Myronidis, which was held at the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies of Israel’s Haifa University from 8/5/2017 to 12/5/2017. Additionally, the authors thank the Cypriot authorities of the Water Development Department (WDD) for supplying the streamflow data. Finally, the insightful comments and suggestions made by the two anonymous reviewers and the editor significantly improved the quality of the present paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Forestry and Natural Environment, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, University Campus, Po Box 268, 54124, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Dimitrios Myronidis

  2. Department of Forestry and Natural Environment Management, Eastern Macedonia and Thrace Institute of Technology, 1st Km Dramas - Mikrochoriou, 66100, Drama, Greece

    Konstantinos Ioannou

  3. Hellenic Agricultural Organization ‘Demeter’, Institute of Plant Breeding & Phytogenetic Resources, P.O. Box 60458, Thermi, 57001, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Dimitrios Fotakis

  4. Division of Hydrometry, Water Development Department, 100 - 110 Kennenty Avenue, 1047, Pallouriotissa, Lefkosia, Cyprus

    Gerald Dörflinger

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  1. Dimitrios Myronidis
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Correspondence to Dimitrios Myronidis.

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Myronidis, D., Ioannou, K., Fotakis, D. et al. Streamflow and Hydrological Drought Trend Analysis and Forecasting in Cyprus. Water Resour Manage 32, 1759–1776 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-018-1902-z

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