Linking long-term water balances and statistical scaling to estimate river flows along the drainage network of Colombia

Long-term average river discharges as well as peak and low flows of different return periods are estimated along the entire river network of Colombia, through the conjoint use of the long-term water balance in the river basins and the framework of statistical scaling, taking the average flow field as the scaling variable. Estimation of the long-term water balance considers the spatial variability of hydrologic fields, in which drainage basins are considered the basic hydrological control volumes for estimation. A systematic effort has been made to estimate the long term average precipitation field combining rain gauge measurements with existing handmade expert maps as an input trend for a universal Kriging interpolation technique. Evaluation of estimates for actual and potential long-term evapotranspiration was implemented using diverse methods. Results were tested using the long term water balance equation against 200 streamflow gauging stations. No method for actual evapotranspiration showed significant superiority. Overall, we conclude that the magnitude of errors arises fundamentally from deficiencies in the data and the sparsity of the observations.