The use of broken power-laws to describe the distributions of daily flow above the mean annual flow across the conterminous U.S.

• Power laws are superior to the lognormal functions to describe daily flow across the US.
• Among power law functions a broken power law is best to describe flows above the mean annual flow.
• One of the parameters of the BPL could be set constant reducing the free parameters to three.
• The inflection point in the distribution is strongly correlated to drainage area.
• The frequency of floods is related to both elevation and the predictability of the hydrologic regime.

A recent study employed a broken power-law (BPL) distribution for understanding the scaling frequency of bankfull discharge in snowmelt-dominated basins. This study, grounded from those findings, investigated the ability of a BPL function to describe the distribution of daily flows above the mean annual flow in 1217 sites across the conterminous U.S. (CONUS). The hydrologic regime in all the sites is unregulated and spans a wide range in drainage areas (2–120,000 km2) and elevation (0–3000 m). Available daily flow records in all sites varied between 15 and 108 years. Comparing the performance of BPL distribution and the traditionally used lognormal distribution, we found that BPL provides stronger fit in ∼80% of the sites. Thus the BPL function provides a suitable tool to model daily flows in most areas of the CONUS. The potential for developing a model for predicting the frequency distribution of daily flows in ungauged sites was analyzed. We found that such model is possible using drainage area, mean basin elevation, and mean annual precipitation as predicting variables for any site located above 600 m across the CONUS. We also found strong continental-wide correlations between 3 of the 4 parameters that describe the BPL and basin characteristics. Our results indicate that the BPL function provides a robust alternative to traditional functions such as the lognormal to model the statistical variation of daily flows above the mean annual in most basins of the CONUS.