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Hydrology is the scientific study of the movement, distribution, and management of water on Earth and other planets, including the water cycle, water resources, and environmental watershed sustainability. A practitioner of hydrology is called a hydrologist. Hydrologists are scientists studying earth or environmental science, civil or environmental engineering, and physical geography. Using various analytical methods and scientific techniques, they collect and analyze data to help solve water related problems such as environmental preservation, natural disasters, and water management.
Evapotranspiration (ET) is the sum of water evaporation and transpiration from a surface area to the atmosphere. Evaporation accounts for the movement of water to the air from sources such as the soil, canopy interception, and water bodies. Transpiration accounts for the movement of water within a plant and the subsequent exit of water as vapor through stomata in its leaves in vascular plants and phyllids in non-vascular plants. A plant that contributes to evapotranspiration is called an evapotranspirator. Evapotranspiration is an important part of the water cycle.
A drainage basin is any area of land where precipitation collects and drains off into a common outlet, such as into a river, bay, or other body of water. The drainage basin includes all the surface water from rain runoff, snowmelt, hail, sleet and nearby streams that run downslope towards the shared outlet, as well as the groundwater underneath the earth's surface. Drainage basins connect into other drainage basins at lower elevations in a hierarchical pattern, with smaller sub-drainage basins, which in turn drain into another common outlet.
Ecohydrology is an interdisciplinary scientific field studying the interactions between water and ecological systems. It is considered a sub discipline of hydrology, with an ecological focus. These interactions may take place within water bodies, such as rivers and lakes, or on land, in forests, deserts, and other terrestrial ecosystems. Areas of research in ecohydrology include transpiration and plant water use, adaption of organisms to their water environment, influence of vegetation and benthic plants on stream flow and function, and feedbacks between ecological processes and the hydrological cycle.
The law of water balance states that the inflows to any water system or area is equal to its outflows plus change in storage during a time interval. In hydrology, a water balance equation can be used to describe the flow of water in and out of a system. A system can be one of several hydrological or water domains, such as a column of soil, a drainage basin, an irrigation area or a city. Water balance can also refer to the ways in which an organism maintains water in dry or hot conditions. It is often discussed in reference to plants or arthropods, which have a variety of water retention mechanisms, including a lipid waxy coating that has limited permeability.
An hydrological transport model is a mathematical model used to simulate the flow of rivers, streams, groundwater movement or drainage front displacement, and calculate water quality parameters. These models generally came into use in the 1960s and 1970s when demand for numerical forecasting of water quality and drainage was driven by environmental legislation, and at a similar time widespread access to significant computer power became available. Much of the original model development took place in the United States and United Kingdom, but today these models are refined and used worldwide.
The Klamath Basin is the region in the U.S. states of Oregon and California drained by the Klamath River. It contains most of Klamath County and parts of Lake and Jackson counties in Oregon, and parts of Del Norte, Humboldt, Modoc, Siskiyou, and Trinity counties in California. The 15,751-square-mile (40,790 km2) drainage basin is 35% in Oregon and 65% in California. In Oregon, the watershed typically lies east of the Cascade Range, while California contains most of the river's segment that passes through the mountains. In the Oregon-far northern California segment of the river, the watershed is semi-desert at lower elevations and dry alpine in the upper elevations. In the western part of the basin, in California, however, the climate is more of temperate rainforest, and the Trinity River watershed consists of a more typical alpine climate.
MapWindow GIS is a lightweight open-source GIS (mapping) desktop application and set of programmable mapping components.
Gobichettipalayam Vasudevan "G. V." Loganathan was an Indian-born American professor, who, at the time of his death, was a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental engineering, part of the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, United States.
Geographic information systems (GISs) have become a useful and important tool in the field of hydrology to study and manage Earth's water resources. Climate change and greater demands on water resources require a more knowledgeable disposition of arguably one of our most vital resources. Because water in its occurrence varies spatially and temporally throughout the hydrologic cycle, its study using GIS is especially practical. Whereas previous GIS systems were mostly static in their geospatial representation of hydrologic features, GIS platforms are becoming increasingly dynamic, narrowing the gap between historical data and current hydrologic reality.
WMS is a watershed computer simulation and modeling software application from Aquaveo. It was originally created in the early 1990s at the Engineering Computer Graphics Laboratory at Brigham Young University.
A hydrologic model is a simplification of a real-world system that aids in understanding, predicting, and managing water resources. Both the flow and quality of water are commonly studied using hydrologic models.
GSSHA is a two-dimensional, physically based watershed model developed by the Engineer Research and Development Center of the United States Army Corps of Engineers. It simulates surface water and groundwater hydrology, erosion and sediment transport. The GSSHA model is used for hydraulic engineering and research, and is on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) list of hydrologic models accepted for use in the national flood insurance program for flood hydrograph estimation. Input is best prepared by the Watershed Modeling System interface, which effectively links the model with geographic information systems (GIS).
SWAT is a river basin scale model developed to quantify the impact of land management practices in large, complex watersheds. SWAT is a public domain software enabled model actively supported by the USDA Agricultural Research Service at the Blackland Research & Extension Center in Temple, Texas, USA. It is a hydrology model with the following components: weather, surface runoff, return flow, percolation, evapotranspiration, transmission losses, pond and reservoir storage, crop growth and irrigation, groundwater flow, reach routing, nutrient and pesticide loading, and water transfer. SWAT can be considered a watershed hydrological transport model. This model is used worldwide and is continuously under development. As of July 2012, more than 1000 peer-reviewed articles have been published that document its various applications.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to hydrology:
Vflo is a commercially available, physics-based distributed hydrologic model generated by Vieux & Associates, Inc. Vflo uses radar rainfall data for hydrologic input to simulate distributed runoff. Vflo employs GIS maps for parameterization via a desktop interface. The model is suited for distributed hydrologic forecasting in post-analysis and in continuous operations. Vflo output is in the form of hydrographs at selected drainage network grids, as well as distributed runoff maps covering the watershed. Model applications include civil infrastructure operations and maintenance, stormwater prediction and emergency management, continuous and short-term surface water runoff, recharge estimation, soil moisture monitoring, land use planning, water quality monitoring, and water resources management.
The Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) model is a physically based erosion simulation model built on the fundamentals of hydrology, plant science, hydraulics, and erosion mechanics. The model was developed by an interagency team of scientists to replace the Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) and has been widely used in the United States and the world. WEPP requires four inputs, i.e., climate, topography, soil, and management (vegetation); and provides various types of outputs, including water balance, soil detachment and deposition at points along the slope, sediment delivery, and vegetation growth. The WEPP model has been improved continuously since its public delivery in 1995, and is applicable for a variety of areas.
DPHM-RS is a semi-distributed hydrologic model developed at University of Alberta, Canada.
Water quality modeling involves water quality based data using mathematical simulation techniques. Water quality modeling helps people understand the eminence of water quality issues and models provide evidence for policy makers to make decisions in order to properly mitigate water. Water quality modeling also helps determine correlations to constituent sources and water quality along with identifying information gaps. Due to the increase in freshwater usage among people, water quality modeling is especially relevant both in a local level and global level. In order to understand and predict the changes over time in water scarcity, climate change, and the economic factor of water resources, water quality models would need sufficient data by including water bodies from both local and global levels.
In hydrology, routing is a technique used to predict the changes in shape of a hydrograph as water moves through a river channel or a reservoir. In flood forecasting, hydrologists may want to know how a short burst of intense rain in an area upstream of a city will change as it reaches the city. Routing can be used to determine whether the pulse of rain reaches the city as a deluge or a trickle.
References
- ↑ "Hydrologic Unit Modeling for the United States". Global Change Master Directory. NASA. Archived from the original on 2004-10-24. Retrieved 2010-06-12.
- ↑ Wurbs, Ralph A.; Ranjan S. Muttiah; Fabrice Felden (2004-12-20). "Incorporation of Climate Change in Water Availability Modeling". Journal of Hydrologic Engineering. 10 (5): 375–385. doi:10.1061/(ASCE)1084-0699(2005)10:5(375).
- ↑ Atwood, Jay D.; Verel Benson; Chi-Chung Chen; Bruce McCarl; R. Srinivasan; Clive Walker (1997-07-28). "Estimating Economic and Environmental Impacts at the National, Regional, and Watershed Levels: The Linked ASM/HUMUS Modeling System" (PDF). Incorporating Environmental Consequences into National Agricultural Policy Analysis: A Regional Perspective. Annual Meeting of the American Agricultural Economics Association. Toronto, Ontario. Retrieved 2010-06-12.
- ↑ Kannan, Narayanan; Chinnasamy Santhi; Jeffrey G. Arnold (2008-09-15). "Development of an automated procedure for estimation of the spatial variation of runoff in large river basins" (PDF). Journal of Hydrology. 359 (1–2): 1–15. doi:10.1016/j.jhydrol.2008.06.001 . Retrieved 2010-06-12.