Abstract
A region with tropical wet and dry climate is characterised by two major seasons of wet and dry. Baseflow could be a good predictor of drought by representing the low flow conditions in this region. Hence, having knowledge regarding baseflow is important for the drought preparedness. Based on this aspect, the study aims to separate the baseflow of Baitarani River, India in a tropical wet and dry climate region using the Eckhardt filter and to compare that with Lyne and Hollick (L&H) filter. The baseflow separated using two filters were further used for the estimation of Baseflow Index (BFI) values for the wet and dry seasons. Throughout both the seasons, Eckhardt filter generates almost same BFI values and shows a high level of agreement with each other, whereas the L&H filter generates a wide range of BFI values. Further, sensitivity analyses performed to analyse the relative importance of Eckhardt filter parameters exhibited that recession parameter is having a significant effect on baseflow only during the dry season, but the BFI has a notable effect on baseflow throughout the season. Hence, being a two parameter filter, Eckhardt filter gives good estimates of baseflow compared to the L&H filter.
