Global Distribution of Mountainous Headwater Catchments Morphology

Mountainous regions are important headwater regions to sustain environmental and human water demands. The morphologies of these headwater catchments control their hydrological response and affect the water supply to downstream. In this study, more than 3.3×10⁷ headwater catchments are extracted. These cover most of the mountainous regions between 60°S and 60°N and their areas range from 0.5 km² to 2 km². Several morphological features closely related to hydrological response and sediment dynamics, such as width function and Melton number, are estimated for the catchments. Particularly, in order to ensure the accuracy of the estimated parameters, two new algorithms are developed, including an improved triangular form-based multiple flow direction algorithm as well as a width function algorithm based on a two-segmented-distance strategy and the multiple equidistant belt technique. Subsequently, a dataset of mountainous headwater catchment morphology is generated by adding the climatic and tectonic features corresponding to each catchment. This dataset can help to identify the hydrological similarities between different headwater catchments, which is important for determining the parameters of hydrological models in ungauged catchments. We analyze the relationship between the catchment morphology features and tectonics (e.g., shortening rate) as well as climate variables (e.g., precipitation and temperature). The results show that great differences exist in catchment morphology between tectonically active areas and inactive areas. Furthermore, the relationship between morphology and climatic variables varies depending on the lithology of the region, with the strongest correlation observed in sedimentary regions.