To ensure the protection of drinking water an understanding of the catchment processes which can affect water quality is important as it enables targeted catchment management actions to be implemented. In this study factor analysis (FA) and comparing event mean concentrations (EMCs) with baseline values were techniques used to asses the relationships between water quality parameters and linking...

A new method of calibration of the Australian Water Balance Model (AWBM) daily rainfall-runoff model allows for errors in the estimation of areal rainfall over the catchment. The result of applying the method to a group of gauged catchments is the production of a single set of parameter values for the AWBM that can be used with any catchment in the group, or used to estimate runoff on ungauged ...

To gain understanding on how alluvial zones modify water and nutrient export from semiarid catchments, we compared monthly discharge as well as stream chloride, carbon, and nitrogen dynamics between a hillslope catchment and a valley-bottom catchment with a well-developed alluvium. Stream water and solute fluxes from the hillslope and valley-bottom catchments showed contrasting patterns between...

Budyko (1974) postulated that long-term catchment water balance is controlled to first order by the available water and energy. This leads to the interesting question of how do landscape characteristics (soils, geology, vegetation) and climate properties (precipitation, potential evaporation, number of wet and dry days) interact at the catchment scale to produce such a simple and predictable ou...

Catchment classification is an efficient method to synthesize our understanding of how climate variability and catchment characteristics interact to define hydrological response. One way to accomplish catchment classification is to empirically relate climate and catchment characteristics to hydrologic behavior and to quantify the skill of predicting hydrologic response based on the combination ...

Quantifying catchment-scale soil property variation yields insights into critical zone evolution and function. The objective of this study was to quantify and predict the spatial distribution of soil properties within a high-elevation forested catchment in southern Arizona, USA, using a combined set of digital soil mapping (DSM) and sampling design techniques to quantify catchment-scale soil sp...

Terrain analysis based on digital elevation models is being routinely used in hydrological modelling. However, landscape connectivity enabling the routing of flow and nutrients from upslope landscape units to adjacent downslope landscape units within a sub watershed is not commonly incorporated into catchment scale models. This paper describes a process of generating connected landscape units w...

Five lumped, conceptual rainfall-runoff models are calibrated for 240 gauged catchments in southeastern Australia. Climate input to the models is distributed at ~25 km grid cells and the catchments range in size from 50 to 2000 km. Each of the models is calibrated on each of the 240 catchments. Each catchment is then simulated using parameters sets calibrated for the nearest neighbouring catchm...

1. Our objective was to investigate the associations between benthic macroinvertebrate communities and environmental factors described at three spatial scales: local, reach and catchment. Differences in these associations, because of local topography, were determined by categorising sites into those having a large or small ‘reach contributing area’ (RCA), which is the lateral area of land contr...

The main objective of the study presented in this paper was to develop an evaluation scheme which is suitable for spatially explicit groundwater vulnerability assessment according to the Water Framework Directive (WFD). Study area was the Hase river catchment, an area of about 3 000 km2 in north-west Germany which is dominated by livestock farming, in particular pig and poultry production. For ...