Detect and Characterize Sub-Daily Flow Fluctuations

An important environmental impact on running water ecosystems is caused by hydropeaking - the discontinuous release of turbine water because of peaks of energy demand. An event-based algorithm is implemented to detect flow fluctuations referring to increase events (IC) and decrease events (DC). For each event, a set of parameters related to the fluctuation intensity is calculated. The framework is introduced in Greimel et al. (2016) "A method to detect and characterize sub-daily flow fluctuations" and can be used to identify different fluctuation types according to the potential source: e.g., sub-daily flow fluctuations caused by hydropeaking, rainfall, or snow and glacier melt. This is a companion to the package 'hydroroute', which is used to detect and follow hydropower plant-specific hydropeaking waves at the sub-catchment scale and to describe how hydropeaking flow parameters change along the longitudinal flow path as proposed and validated in Greimel et al. (2022) .