Hydraulic conductivity is the term used to describe how easily a fluid moves through a porous medium. In the case of water infiltrating into soils, the fluid is the water and the porous medium is the soil. We often use K to represent hydraulic conductivity when we are writing equations. …
In Watershed Hydrology, we’ve been talking about soil moisture and water potential in relation to evaporation and infiltration. An important concept is the idea of the unsaturated zone, where the pores (or open spaces) in the soil, sediment or rock are not completely filled with water most of the time. …
Evapotranspiration is often said to be the most difficult water balance component to directly measure. When water goes from liquid to vapor, you can’t exactly catch it in a bucket or measure flow in a channel. Last week in class, we used a very simplified version of the weighing lysimeter to …
In Watershed Hydrology class this week, we’ll be conducting student-designed experiments to study the factors affecting evapotranspiration. I had a lot of fun picking out various species of plants today and I’m looking forward to seeing how each group sets up their experiments and what results we get. The procedure …
It’s been about a year since I’ve updated this blog, but it’s not that I didn’t have anything to say. Instead, members of the Watershed Hydrology lab were doing so many great things that I just didn’t do a good job of stopping to write them down here. But below, …
Today is the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. This day is designated by the UN because “Over the past 15 years, the global community has made a lot of effort in inspiring and engaging women and girls in science. Yet women and girls continue to be excluded …
In the previous post, I reviewed approaches for point measurements of precipitation (i.e., rain gauges), talked about the care that must be taken to site well and minimize undercatch, and identified some of the common data sources for rain gauge measurements in the United States. Rain gauges do a great …
As watershed hydrologists, we care a lot about precipitation, especially when it reaches the land surface (or the vegetation just above it). Precipitation is the dominant input to our water balances and a major driver of streamflow and water table responses. Because precipitation is so important, we need to spend …
What did I do in the past year? Let’s make a go at counting. One NSF proposal funded and going. Read about the STORMS project, in which we’re trying to connect stormwater decision making to hydrologic and ecologic outcomes at the watershed scale. Two papers published, both open access. Read …
Congratulations to Catherine Ruhm, who defended her MS thesis in Geology in mid-November. Catherine took on a complicated and intensive project on the soils and hydrology of abandoned mine lands in Cuyahoga Valley National Park, collecting absolutely critical baseline data on the properties of five sites which had been mined …