Legendary fluvial geomorphologist Reds Wolman once said “Floods come from too much water,” and that’s the phenomenon distilled to its core essence. But this bit of wisdom doesn’t give us much to go on if we want to understand what creates floods or why some areas are more flood-prone than …
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 …
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 …
1. Introduction As a scientist, one of my big challenges is to keep on top of the vast and ever-growing body of scientific knowledge about my research and teaching subjects. I’m not the only one who apparently struggles with this task, or wishes she could do more. on January 1st, …
Students in GEOL 21062, Spring 2016, at Kent State University have been sharing interesting news stories with me all semester long. Here’s our complilation. Hopefully these are interesting things for other people too!
https://storify.com/highlyanne/environmental-earth-science-news-roundup-4