streamflow

Water balance partitioning within dryland intermittent and ephemeral streams controls water availability to riparian ecosystems, the magnitude of peak storm discharge and groundwater replenishment. Poorly understood is how superficial geology can play a role in governing the spatiotemporal complexity in flow processes.

Zachariashoek  catchment  was  one  of  the  study  areas  looking  into  the  hydrological characteristics  of winter rainfall catchments in the Western Cape. Nearly thirty years of historical data are available for the Zachariashoek area. This data include rainfall, gauge plate readings for the weirs, and water levels for the boreholes in the area. Numerous articles and reports had been written  about  the  research  done  in  the  area,  concentrating  mostly  on  the  effects  of  fire  on streamflow and vegetation.

Groundwater is an important resource for multiple uses in South Africa. Hence, setting limits to its sustainable abstraction while assuring basic human needs is required. Due to prevalent data scarcity related to groundwater replenishment, which is the traditional basis for estimating groundwater availability, the present article presents a novel method for determining allocatable groundwater in quaternary catchments through information on streamflow.