HR: 08:15h
AN: H31J-02    [Abstracts]
TI: Physical Origins of Statistical Scale Invariance or Scaling in Peak Flows in Real River Networks
AU: * Mantilla, R
EM: ricardo@cires.colorado.edu
AF: Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering, University of Colorado at Boulder. UCB 428., Boulder, CO 80309 United States
AU: * Mantilla, R
EM: ricardo@cires.colorado.edu
AF: Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), University of Colorado at Boulder. UCB 216., Boulder, CO 80309 United States
AU: Gupta, V K
EM: guptav@cires.colorado.edu
AF: Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering, University of Colorado at Boulder. UCB 428., Boulder, CO 80309 United States
AU: Gupta, V K
EM: guptav@cires.colorado.edu
AF: Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), University of Colorado at Boulder. UCB 216., Boulder, CO 80309 United States
AU: Furey, P
EM: furey@cires.colorado.edu
AF: Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), University of Colorado at Boulder. UCB 216., Boulder, CO 80309 United States
AU: Furey, P
EM: furey@cires.colorado.edu
AF: Colorado Research Associates (CoRA), 3380 Mitchell Lane, Boulder, CO 80301 United States
AB: For nearly forty years, regional flood frequency analyses in unnested and in nested basins have shown that annual peak-flow quantiles can be related to drainage areas as power laws that arise from the property of scale invariance. This empirical feature has instigated a basic hydrologic question: Can power laws be obtained from physical processes governing rainfall-runoff transformations on real channel networks? There has been steady progress in answering this question since 1990. A physical understanding of peak flow scaling requires the time scales of individual rainfall-runoff events as a first step before going to longer time scales. We have used data from two Agriculture Research Service (ARS) experimental basins in the United States to test the physical basis of scaling in peak flows. The first basin is Goodwin Creek in Mississippi (21 km²), and the second one is Walnut Gulch in Arizona (150 km²). We have tested the hypothesis that scaling parameters of individual flood events on Goodwin Creek vary from one event to the next due to the effect of temporal rainfall variability. On the Walnut Gulch, we have tested the hypothesis that scaling in peak flows for short duration rainfall events is controlled by the river network topological and geometric configuration and the downstream hydraulic-geometric properties. Based on these results we present a gauging strategy to investigate peak flow scaling in the 1100 km² Whitewater basin in Kansas.
DE: 1800 HYDROLOGY
DE: 1805 Computational hydrology
DE: 1819 Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
DE: 1821 Floods
DE: 1839 Hydrologic scaling
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005