A Nonlinear Dynamical Systems based Model for Stochastic Simulation of Streamflow

Traditional time series methods model the evolution of the underlying process as a linear or nonlinear function of the autocorrelation. These methods capture the distributional statistics but are incapable of providing insights into the dynamics of the process, the potential regimes, and predictability. This work develops a nonlinear dynamical model for stochastic simulation of streamflows. In this, first a wavelet spectral analysis is employed on the flow series to isolate dominant orthogonal quasi periodic timeseries components. The periodic bands are added denoting the 'signal' component of the time series and the residual being the 'noise' component. Next, the underlying nonlinear dynamics of this combined band time series is recovered. For this the univariate time series is embedded in a d-dimensional space with an appropriate lag T to recover the state space in which the dynamics unfolds. Predictability is assessed by quantifying the divergence of trajectories in the state space with time, as Lyapunov exponents. The nonlinear dynamics in conjunction with a K-nearest neighbor time resampling is used to simulate the combined band, to which the noise component is added to simulate the timeseries. We demonstrate this method by applying it to the data at Lees Ferry that comprises of both the paleo reconstructed and naturalized historic annual flow spanning 1490-2010. We identify interesting dynamics of the signal in the flow series and epochal behavior of predictability. These will be of immense use for water resources planning and management.