Year-to-year and many-year river runoff variations in Baikal drainage basin

New approaches, methods, and formulas, proposed by the author, are used to study many-year and year-to-year variations of the annual, maximal, and minimal runoff of rivers in Baikal Lake drainage basin. The stationary character of most changes in the annual and maximal runoff (including major Baikal tributaries at the gages nearest to the lake) is demonstrated and the percentage of transient changes in the minimal runoff is shown to be close to the mean world characteristics. Some effects found in Baikal Basin have been generally recorded only in the data of runoff observations in much larger basins or globally: “the law of the power of minus 0.5” for the dependence of the coefficient of variation and the correlation between neighboring years on the mean runoff depth, a fixed structure of the orders of stochastic (autoregression models), the effect of bifurcation of the models of maximal and minimal runoff at the passage from drier to wetter watersheds.