Revealing the diversity of hydropeaking flow regimes

Hydropeaking, a hydroelectricity generation strategy involving rapid changes to flow releases from dams in response fluctuations hourly-adjusted electricity markets, has been widely applied due its economic efficiency. However, these operational practices produce sub-daily that pose substantial hazards riverine ecosystems and human activities. To ascertain the downstream impacts of hydropeaking, features hydropeaking have analyzed with respect ecologically relevant hydrologic variables. since studies aiming characterize regime often require manual feature extraction, they are limited small temporal spatial scales. Additionally, ecologists commonly treated as broadly similar flow-alteration pattern regardless complexities market differences natural settings where it is applied. Therefore, this study sought determine whether significantly different patterns exist on regional scale, revealed by variation over long scale (>five years). fulfill goal, new algorithm, Hydropeaking Event Detection Algorithm (HEDA), was developed R automate characterization regimes. Clustering analyses were conducted explore similarities regimes among 33 sites numerous regions California. Four distinct classes identified distinguished duration frequency hydropeaking. Meanwhile, rate change, amplitude timing hdyropeaking played less important roles classification.