Classification of daily streamflow data: a study on regime changes.

The climate change often affects the variability and persistence of river discharges that may show an alterated balance between snow and rainfall and an intensification of extreme hydrological events. Such climate-induced hydro logic changes may have relevant consequences on the freshwater ecosystem. The search of simple but effective tools for river regime classification is still a topic of interest in order to investigate variations in flow regimes and evaluate future climate impact. In this article, we present a procedure for classifying streamflow time series acccording to their underlying dynamic structures. We illustrate our approach an alyzing streamflow data from 221 unregulated catchments in the United States