Please note that this session was withdrawn and is no longer available in the respective programme. This withdrawal might have been the result of a merge with another session.
HS2.1.9 | The search for and use of hydrological regularities
EDI
The search for and use of hydrological regularities
Convener: Sebastian GnannECSECS | Co-conveners: Wouter Berghuijs, Lan Wang-Erlandsson, Peter Greve
The search for regularities and laws in hydrology (sensu Dooge) is difficult. Hydrologists struggle to transfer site-specific findings to other regions and to transfer small-scale knowledge to larger scales. While growing amounts of data and new methods facilitate the search for patterns, it is often unclear how these (empirical) patterns can be linked to processes and placed on a solid theoretical footing.

The search for hydrological regularities will benefit from connecting places, scales, concepts, and methods, and some regularities might only become apparent when we integrate different Earth Science disciplines. Landscapes are closely coupled with the climate system and evolve and adapt over time scales ranging from days to millions of years. Over longer time scales, geomorphic and geologic processes shape landscapes. At shorter time scales, ecosystems evolve with their environment, and humans increasingly affect the water cycle, potentially inducing social-hydrological feedback loops. Understanding how these agents relate, interact and evolve, and which regularities underlie this, will help us to better understand the water cycle and its role in the Earth system.

Since hydrologists are often interested in building predictive models to answer practical questions, we also need to find ways to incorporate known hydrological regularities into our models. This will strengthen the scientific basis of models and thus their credibility in modeling change.

In this session, we discuss the search for and use of hydrological regularities, and we seek contributions that:
- Use, extend, or re-assess known regularities (e.g. the Budyko hypothesis, the Dunne diagram, fill-and-spill, etc.)
- Help to understand the drivers of catchment similarity and how that may be used to transfer knowledge in space and time (regionalization)
- Investigate the role of landscape evolution and coevolution and how that might be used to constrain hydrological behavior
- Help to predict the future evolution of catchment properties and hydrologic response in a non-stationary environment
- Help to understand how human impacts affect the water cycle, including social-ecological feedback loops
- Use new data-driven methods to utilize the growing amounts of data and establish connections between different data sources
- Make use of hydrological regularities to build, evaluate, and improve hydrological models (from hillslope to global scales).