HR: 10:20h
AN: H12E-01 INVITED    [Abstracts]
TI: Conceptualizing, testing, and transferring watershed characteristics-runoff generation relationships
AU: * McGlynn, B L
EM: bmcglynn@montana.edu
AF: Montana State University, 334 Leon Johnson Hall, Bozeman, MT 59717-3120, United States
AU: Jencso, K
EM: kjencso@montana.edu
AF: Montana State University, 334 Leon Johnson Hall, Bozeman, MT 59717-3120, United States
AU: Payn, R A
EM: robpayn@cc.usu.edu
AF: Colorado School of Mines and Geology, 1500 Illinois St., Golden, CO 80401, United States
AU: Gooseff, M N
EM: mgooseff@engr.psu.edu
AF: Penn State University, 212 Sackett Bldg, University Park, PA 16802, United States
AU: Wondzell, S M
EM: swondzell@fs.fed.us
AF: US Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station Olympia Forestry Sciences Lab, 3625 93rd Ave SW, Olympia, WA 98512, United States
AU: Seibert, J
EM: jan.seibert@ma.slu.se
AB: Despite ongoing efforts to understand watershed hydrology through qualitative and quantitative measures and analyses, the relationships between watershed characteristics and streamflow response are still poorly understood. Part of the difficulty lies in ascertaining which watershed characteristics are most important for streamflow generation from one watershed to the next. This difficulty is exacerbated by the temporal variability in the hydrologic-state of a watershed: it can depend on stormflow versus baseflow, dry versus wet antecedent conditions, annual versus event based analyses, and storm characteristics. Despite these difficulties, our task remains: to gain new insight in experimental watersheds for transfer to new gauged and ungauged watersheds. This presentation addresses three interrelated aspects of watershed characterization: 1) conceptualizing and testing upland-stream connectivity over space and time (where and when stormflow is generated along the stream network), 2) assessing spatial and temporal controls on stream baseflow generation and (where and why surface water gains and losses occur at the network scale), and 3) assessing and conceptualizing dominant response characteristics of landscape elements from headwaters to the meso-scale. We emphasize new insight gained in highly instrumented experimental watersheds, new tracer-based techniques for assessing streamflow gains and losses at the stream network scale, and the use of ALSM (airborne laser swath mapping) high resolution topography data for extending hydrological process understanding to the basin scale. Understanding spatially and temporally dynamic hydrological processes and their distribution is a necessary step toward improved model representation of complex systems.
DE: 1804 Catchment
DE: 1829 Groundwater hydrology
DE: 1839 Hydrologic scaling
DE: 1860 Streamflow
DE: 1895 Instruments and techniques: monitoring
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting