Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T14:08:00.189Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

9 - Hydrologic Scaling and Spatial Heterogeneity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2019

Gordon Bonan
Affiliation:
National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado
Get access

Summary

The hydrologic cycle on land includes infiltration, runoff, and evapotranspiration. This chapter reviews the principles of infiltration and runoff and discusses parameterizations to scale runoff over large regions with heterogeneous soils. These parameterizations rely on statistical distributions to characterize soil moisture variability. A similar statistical approach accounts for nonlinearity in soil moisture effects on evapotranspiration using either continuous or discrete statistical distributions. Snow cover is particularly patchy, and models divide land into snow-covered and snow-free areas when calculating surface fluxes. Many models additionally account for heterogeneity in vegetation and soils by dividing a model grid cell into several tiles.
Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×