Efficacy of Time Series Tests: A Critical Assessment - Hydrologic Time Series Analysis: Theory and Practice - page 137

7
Efficacy of Time Series Tests:
A Critical Assessment
7.1 Introduction
The application of statistical hydrology in earlier days was restricted to surface
water problems only, especially for analyzing the hydrologic extremes such as
floods and droughts (McCuen, 2003). However, during past three decades, the
statistical domain of hydrology has broadened to encompass the problems
related to both surface water and groundwater resources (Shahin et al., 1993;
Machiwal and Jha, 2006). With such a broad domain, time series analysis has
emerged as a powerful tool for the efficient planning and management of
scarce freshwater resources.
Time series analysis has a vast scope in geology, ocean technology,
seismology, etc. Time series analysis has also been applied to many hydrological
and climatological situations in the past. For instance, time series studies have
been carried out for analyzing the historic rainfall data (e.g., Henderson,
1989; De Michele et al., 1998; Mirza et al., 1998; Pagliara et al., 1998;
Abaurrea and Cebrian, 2003; Pugacheva et al., 2003; Astel et al., 2004),
streamflow data (Avinash and Ghanshyam, 1988; Capodaglio and Moisello,
1990; Radziejewski et al., 2000; Fanta et al., 2001; Adeloye and Montaseri,
2002; Chen and Rao, 2002), flood data (Grew and Werrity, 1995; Changnon
and Kunkel, 1995; Westmacott and Burn, 1997; Robson et al., 1998; Reed et
al., 1999; Lins and Slack, 1999; Loukas and Quick, 1996, 1999; Cayan et al.,
1999; Jain and Lall, 2001; Douglas et al., 2000; Adamowski and Bocci, 2001;
Zhang et al., 2001; Cunderlik and Burn, 2002), infiltration data (Schwankl et
al., 2000), and surface water quality data (Jayawardena and Lai, 1989;
Higashino et al., 1999) as well as for generating synthetic rainfall data in
semi-arid regions (Janos et al., 1988), determining water consumption patterns
(Maidment and Parzen, 1984), detecting trends in evapotranspiration and wind
speed (Hameed et al., 1997; Raghuwanshi and Wallender, 1997), and for
detecting climatic changes (Kite, 1989; Khan, 2001).