Rainfall-runoff model for the Nzoia drainage basin

Abstract

The Wiener-Hopf theory of optimum dynamic systems is applied to the determination of stable runoff impulse response functions of Nzoia River drainage hydrologic system from coincident records of input rainfall and output discharge for a data observation interval of two hours in an upper subcatchment and of eight hours in the whole basin. The analysis proceeds not from the assumption that many hydrologic systems are linear, for Amorocho (1963) and others have conclusively shown the contrary, but rather from the practical point of view that seeks to extract the maximum usefulness from linear methodology in Kenyan rivers before accepting the complexities attending to the non-linear approaches.