It’s a rainy day and you can see that the water level is rising in your local stream. That’s because of the rain falling on the stream channel and its tributaries, right? Wrong.
In most watersheds, <1% of the land area is covered by streams, lakes, and wetlands, and that means that more than 99% of rain lands on vegetation or land rather than on water.\u00a0 So in order to explain why water levels in streams and rivers rise during storms or shortly thereafter, we have to get the water from land downhill to the stream network. We call the processes that do that work streamflow generation mechanisms or runoff generation mechanisms.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There are four classic streamflow generation mechanisms and I’ve cobbled together videos on each of them. If you’ve ever wanted to know more about what is happening under your feet in wet weather, and you’ve got about an hour to spare, you can learn all about it by working your way through the videos below.\u00a0<\/p>\n
If videos aren’t your thing, or you want to supplement what you watch with some informative web pages and even practice quizzes, check out this resource from the COMET program.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n Start here to learn about streamflow generation<\/strong>
If you’ve only got time for one video, this one is the content-rich introduction that you are looking for:<\/p>\n\n\n\n