RETROSPECTIVE ANALYSIS OF WATERNESS CHANGE IN THE DON RIVER

Water resources are one of the most important problems of our time. Population growth, industrial and agricultural development all over the world entail an ever-increasing demand for clean fresh water. These circumstances induce hydrologists to actively and thoroughly study the problem of studying water resources, changing their quantitative and qualitative characteristics in time and space, and the peculiarities of changes in the water regime of river runoff under conditions of climatic changes. In this work, we performed a retrospective analysis and assessment of changes in the water content of the Upper Don basin over a long 126-year period of hydrometric observational data (1881/1882–2006/2007). To study the change in the water content of the Upper Don River, we used the difference integral curves of the annual and seasonal (spring flood, summerautumn and winter low-water periods) runoff. Regularities of long-term cyclical fluctuations in the water content of the annual and seasonal runoff of the Upper Don are obtained. A retrospective analysis of long-term data of hydrometric observations made it possible to distinguish long phases of high-water, medium-water-content and low-water years on the differential integral curves of river runoff. Each phase, which is long in terms of water content, contains groups of years of shorter duration, for example, 2–3-year and 4–5-year phases of increased and decreased water content in a river. The analysis of the differential integral curves of the annual and seasonal runoff made it possible to establish that the long-term fluctuations in the annual runoff of the Upper Don are rhythmic, in contrast to the runoff of the spring flood, summer-autumn and winter low-water periods, which are characterized by a monotonic regime.