Catchment Hydrology: Introduction

Water flow through watersheds

Learning Goals

• Know the basics of catchment hydrology and about how water moves through watersheds
• Understand the importance of the water balance in a watershed in setting the river discharge

Videos

A brief introduction to flow and water balance within a watershed

Catchment hydrology

I’m giving you a quick introduction to some core hydrological concepts that will be relevant to thinking of water flowing through watersheds and becoming important for hydrology.

If you haven’t heard of “evapotranspiration”, just watch this 32-second silent movie. You’ll get it!

Landscape evolution

This is a teaser for where we are going. Landscape evolution models, such as this, simulate the two-way feedback between erosion in river channels and changing shapes and areas of drainage basins (i.e., catchments), as well as hillslope processes (here, creep only).

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