Journal of Watershed Management Research

One of the challenges for hydrologists is finding a new method for hydrologic classification of catchments. An appropriate classification method can be effective in many branches of hydrologic science like modeling. To deal with the complexity and nonlinearity of hydrologic processes, some researchers have proposed using the chaos theory for catchment classification. In this research, possibility of using this concept in classification of 60 catchments in Iran (using daily runoff data) has been analyzed and embedding dimension (M) of dynamic systems has been used as a parameter for catchments classification. Regarding the obtained results, catchments can be classified into three group whit high (probability), average (deterministic-probability) and low (deterministic). The results indicate that although there is some similarity and homogeneity in some regions and climates, using the geographic position of a catchment can’t suggest a group that the catchment belongs to and that, insteade embedding dimension can be used as a criterion for catchment classification.