Vijay K. Gupta Research GroupRainfall, evaporation, transpiration, and runoff generation from hillslopes, and water transport on channel networks in river basins are highly variable in space and time. Despite this space-time complexity, observations show that the statistics of many coupled hydrologic phenomena in river basins exhibit power laws. Contemporary theoretical advances show that power laws describe self-similarity, or scale invariance, with respect to geometrical, statistical and dynamic properties of complex nonlinear systems. Four hydrologic examples are given to illustrate presence of power laws in data.
What are the physical processes that give rise to observed power laws in these diverse hydrologic phenomena? A physical understanding of mean power-law relationships, and the fluctuations surrounding them, is necessary to address this question and to solve the long-standing problem of predicting flows in ungauged basin across multiple space and time scales. Our research is focused on answering this fundamental issue. |
Group MembersPeter Furey |