Award Date

1-1-2002

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Geoscience

First Committee Member

Zhongbo Yu

Number of Pages

91

Abstract

This study focuses on representing the small variations in hydrologic properties at various scales. Numerical experiments are used to explore the effects of the distributions of various hydrologic processes at various scales. The model used in this study is a physically based distributed hydrologic model system (HMS). The HMS is implemented in a 7.29 km2 sub-watershed within the Susquehanna River Basin in Pennsylvania. Rasterized data sets such as topographic data, soil data, and land use/land cover data are used as input to the HMS. Geographic Information System package is used to preprocess the raster data sets. Stochastic approaches are applied to account for small-scale variations of hydrologic properties that are traditionally viewed as homogeneous. 50 simulation runs are conducted at various spatial and temporal scales. The results show that 100 meters in space and 15 minutes in time are optimal scales for accurate and efficient simulations. Scale factor functions are developed based on the numerical experiments. Hydrologic responses at large scales can be predicted by a scale factor based on the simulated responses at small scales. This study provides an alternative to the hydrologic simulations at different scales.

Keywords

Evaluating; Hydrologic; Processes; Scale; Small; Space; Time; Variations

Controlled Subject

Hydrology

File Format

pdf

File Size

1792 KB

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

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