A comparison of hydrological and topological watersheds

We introduce the hydrological watershed, a watershed where water can penetrate the soil, and compare it with the topological watershed for a two-dimensional landscape. For this purpose, we measure the fractal dimension of the hydrological watershed for different penetration depths and different grid...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific reports 2018-07, Vol.8 (1), p.10586-5, Article 10586
Main Authors: Burger, B., Andrade, J. S., Herrmann, H. J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
639/301/1034/1039
639/766/530/2795
Fractals
Humanities and Social Sciences
Hydrology
multidisciplinary
Physics
Scaling
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Watersheds
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Summary:We introduce the hydrological watershed, a watershed where water can penetrate the soil, and compare it with the topological watershed for a two-dimensional landscape. For this purpose, we measure the fractal dimension of the hydrological watershed for different penetration depths and different grid sizes. Through finite size scaling, we find that the fractal dimension is 1.31 ± 0.02 which is significantly higher than the fractal dimension of the topological watershed. This indicates that the hydrological watershed belongs to a new universality class. We also find that, as opposed to the topological watershed, the hydrodynamic watershed can exhibit disconnected islands.
ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/s41598-018-28470-2