  Analysis of daily streamflow variability in space and time is important for
water resources planning, development, and management. The natural variability
of streamflow is being complicated by anthropogenic influences and climate
change, which may introduce additional complexity into the phenomenological
records. To address this question for daily discharge data recorded during the
period 1989-2016 at twelve gauging stations on Brazos River in Texas (USA), we
use a set of novel quantitative tools: Kolmogorov complexity (KC) with its
derivative associated measures to assess complexity, and Lyapunov time (LT) to
assess predictability. We find that all daily discharge series exhibit long
memory with an increasing downflow tendency, while the randomness of the series
at individual sites cannot be definitively concluded. All Kolmogorov complexity
measures have relatively small values with the exception of the USGS (United
States Geological Survey) 08088610 station at Graford, Texas, which exhibits
the highest values of these complexity measures. This finding may be attributed
to the elevated effect of human activities at Graford, and proportionally
lesser effect at other stations. In addition, complexity tends to decrease
downflow, meaning that larger catchments are generally less influenced by
anthropogenic activity. The correction on randomness of Lyapunov time
(quantifying predictability) is found to be inversely proportional to the
Kolmogorov complexity, which strengthens our conclusion regarding the effect of
anthropogenic activities, considering that KC and LT are distinct measures,
based on rather different techniques.
