Catchment hydrology

Catchment hydrology is the study of the hydrology in drainage basins.

Water balance

Catchment hydrology is based on the principal of continuity, which is used to perform a water balance on a catchment:

,

where = inputs (P, precipitation + OW, occult water), = outputs (ET, evapotranspiration + R, runoff), and = the change in catchment storage over time.

Neglecting the minor inputs of occult water, the water balance can be revised to

.

Finally, considering a catchment on a long time scale, typically a year or more, removes the storage component from the equation:

.[1]

(For more information see water balance)

Terminology

There are many terms involved with and related to catchment hydrology. These basic ones are taken from the glossary of terms in Kendall and McDonnell, 1998:

gollark: It has a WiFi card, obviously, which has yet another computer in it for running... whatever WiFi cards do...
gollark: Graphics Microcontroller and HEVC Microcontroller, they're a weird implementation detail of recent Intel GPUs.
gollark: That is of course not all.
gollark: Consider my laptop: as well as the actual "computer" composed of the main CPU cores and RAM and whatever, the main CPU die also contains at least four other independent computers: the Intel Management Engine, the GuC and HuC on the GPU, and I think a processor which runs power management.
gollark: No, the BIOS is just the first stage of the boot process.

References

  1. Kendall and McDonnell, 1998. Isotope Tracers in Catchment Hydrology. Elsevier

See also

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