H ydrologic extremes are costly to the nation. Annual U.S. drought and flood damages over the last decade have averaged between $6–$8 and $2 billion, respectively (FEMA 1995). Losses associated with the four-year 2000s drought in the western United States are likely to be in the tens of billions of dollars. To the extent that floods and droughts can be mitigated by management of water stored in...

The hydrologic adversaries like high magnitude storms, extreme dryness, aridity, more than normal demand for water etc. often cause a huge stress on the storage structures such as reservoirs and check dams. This stress implies a lot of adverse effects on the adjacent population. One of the major causes of floods and droughts were due to the mis-management of stored water during hydrologic adver...

Floods are among the most catastrophic natural disasters around the globe impacting human lives and infrastructure. Implementation of a flood prediction system can potentially help mitigate flood-induced hazards. Such a system typically requires implementation and calibration of a hydrologic model using in situ observations (i.e., rain gauges and stream gauges). Recently, satellite remote sensi...

The support vector machine is used as a data mining technique to extract informative hydrologic data on the basis of a strong relationship between error tolerance and the number of support vectors. Hydrologic data of flash flood events in the Lan-Yang River basin in Taiwan were used for the case study. Various percentages (from 50% to 10%) of hydrologic data, including those for flood stage and...

The hydrologic cycle results from the combination of energy conversions and atmospheric transport, and the laws of thermodynamics set limits to both. Here, we apply thermodynamics to derive the limits of the strength of hydrologic cycling within the Earth system and about the properties and processes that shape these limits. We set up simple models to derive analytical expressions of the limits...

Decision support for planning and management of water resources needs to consider many target criteria simultaneously like water availability, water quality, flood protection, agriculture, ecology, etc. Hydrologic models provide information about the water balance components and are fundamental for the simulation of ecological processes. Objective of this contribution is to discuss the suitabil...

Hydrologic processes in the pinyon-juniper woodlands of the western region of the United States are variable because of the inherent interactions among the occurring precipitation regimes, geomorphological settings, and edaphic conditions that characterize the ecosystem. A wide range of past and present land-use practices further complicates comprehensive evaluations of these hydrologic process...

An ensemble local hydrologic forecast derived from the seasonal forecasts of the International Research Institute for Climate Prediction (IRI) is presented. Three-month seasonal forecasts were used to resample historical meteorological conditions and generate ensemble forcing datasets for a TOPMODEL-based hydrology model. Eleven retrospective forecasts were run at Florida and New York sites. Fo...

Hydrologic research is a very demanding application of fiber-optic distributed temperature sensing (DTS) in terms of precision, accuracy and calibration. The physics behind the most frequently used DTS instruments are considered as they apply to four calibration methods for single-ended DTS installations. The new methods presented are more accurate than the instrument-calibrated data, achieving...

Basin hydrologic response is a function of soil moisture distributional featuresAn information-based dimensionless index of hydrologic complexity is appliedThe complexity index characterizes soil moisture distributional features.