A COMPUTER MODEL FOR SOME BRANCHING-TYPE PHENOMENA IN HYDROLOGY
Open Access
- 1 February 1968
- journal article
- Published by Taylor & Francis in International Association of Scientific Hydrology. Bulletin
- Vol. 13 (1) , 5-13
- https://doi.org/10.1080/02626666809493561
Abstract
In hydrology, branching-type phenomena occur in several instances, for example in ground-water flow (splitting flow channels in a porous medium) and in the formation of a natural river network (combining, i.e., inverse branching, of small rivers to form large rivers). Such phenomena can be treated by the statistics of topological bifurcating arborescences. It is shown how ensembles of arborescences can be generated on a computer and expectation values for observables can be calculated. In this fashion, the laws of dispersion processes in flow through porous media and Horton's law of stream numbers in drainage basins are shown to be the outcome of very simple statistical assumptions.Keywords
This publication has 2 references indexed in Scilit:
- Quantitative analysis of watershed geomorphologyEOS, Transactions American Geophysical Union, 1957
- EROSIONAL DEVELOPMENT OF STREAMS AND THEIR DRAINAGE BASINS; HYDROPHYSICAL APPROACH TO QUANTITATIVE MORPHOLOGYGSA Bulletin, 1945