Innovative regionalisation of low-flow characteristics in Austria

The aim of the study is a consistent estimation of a wide range of low-flow characteristics at observed and unobserved river sites in Austria. For this purpose, novel regionalisation models are to be developed and evaluated with regard to their predictive performance at unobserved sites. A nested model is proposed as the model structure, which takes into account low flow (NQ) of different time scales (year, season, month, minimum observed value) in hierarchical form, in order to obtain consistent estimates of derived mean characteristic values and extreme value statistics. The regionalisation aims at a consistent estimation of natural low flows and uses a data set of at most slightly anthropogenically influenced daily flow series with more than 40 years of observations.