Chapter 1

Chapter 1
Hydrology, earth system

science and global
environmental change
1.1 Introduction
The year 2000 saw significant flooding in many parts of the
world. The largest floods for many decades struck
Mozambique in February, driving 733 000 people from their
homes and killing 929. Over four million people living in the
Mekong Delta were affected by a series of floods between
September and November - the largest for 70 years - and 865
people lost their lives. Nearly 1500 people in eastern India
and Bangladesh were killed by floods in September and
Copyright © 2002. Taylor and Francis. All rights reserved.
October, and up to 24 million people were displaced. In

Europe, the largest floods for at least 50 years inundated
many floodplains in northern Italy during October, and
Britain experienced the most widespread flooding in October
and November for more than 50 years: river levels at York
rose to their highest level since 1625.
After each of these floods - and indeed after most of the

largest floods during the last decade of the twentieth century -
journalists, the public and politicians have speculated that
various human activities may be making floods both more
frequent and more severe. Was the unusually heavy rainfall
27
Arnell, Nigel W.. Hydrology and Global Environmental Change, Taylor and Francis, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/gwu/detail.action?docID=1810490.
Created from gwu on 2017-09-18 08:19:29.
that triggered many of the floods of 2000 “caused” by global
warming? Were the floods exacerbated by land use change in
the catchment, such as urbanisation and deforestation? Were
flood heights increased because of the construction of flood
banks upstream? To what extent was the increased flood
damage due to increased exposure to flood loss? Was the year
2000 really any worse than previous years?
Floods are just one of the ways in which human society

interacts with the hydrological system. People need water for
drinking, washing and preparing food, farmers need water to
irrigate crops, industry uses water both as a raw material and
for cooling, and rivers are important parts of the transport
network in many countries: rivers are also used to carry away
waste. Pressures on the available water are increasing in many
countries, as demand for water rises, and at the same time the
resource is often being polluted and degraded. Polluted water
can carry disease and lead to ill-health and death, and the
extent and timing of many water-borne diseases - such as
malaria and schistosomiasis are very much influenced by
hydrological regimes.
Activities in the catchment, such as deforestation,

urbanisation, abstraction of water and the use of agricultural
chemicals, are also affecting hydrological
processes and regimes - and these effects have an impact on
the water environment, not only in the river channel but also
in wetlands, on the floodplain and along the river corridor.
Human activities are also affecting the inputs to the
catchment, through global warming and acid rain. The United
Nations Environment Program’s review of the state of the
world’s environment (UNEP, 1999) highlights many
examples of the degradation of the water environment, as do
28
continental-scale assessments in Europe (Stanners &
Bourdeau, 1995; European Environment Agency, 1999).
“Water” has been identified as the emerging critical
environmental issue of the twenty-first century (Cosgrove &C
Rijsberman, 2000; WMO, 1997).
The aim of this book is to explore the linkages between global

environmental change and the hydrological system: it
examines how changes in the catchment and the inputs to the
catchment affect hydrological regimes, and also assesses the
role played by hydrological processes in global environmental
change. It focuses on the hydrological system at the land
surface, rather than over the ocean. This introductory chapter
places hydrology in the context of earth system science,
introduces the concept of global environmental change, and
describes the changing way in which hydrology is being
studied.
1.2 Hydrology and earth system

science
Hydrology is broadly defined as the study of the occurrence,

distribution, circulation and properties of water on the earth,
and the hydrological cycle (Figure 1.1) lies at the heart of
hydrological science. All the water that falls as precipitation
has evaporated from the land and the oceans. Rivers transport
some of the precipitated water across the land surface, to be
evaporated elsewhere - from the sea or a lake, for example -
and much is transported from one place to another as water
vapour in the atmosphere. Water is being continuously
recycled through the oceans, atmosphere, lithosphere,
29
cryosphere (ice sheets, glaciers and permafrost) and biosphere
(vegetation). Hydrology is therefore central to any
understanding of the way the earth system works.
Hydrological science can be seen as the component of
“geoscience” that links land, vegetation, atmosphere and
ocean (Figure 1.2), and which is a part of earth system
science. In practice, hydrologists are usually concerned with
freshwater (oceanographers deal with the oceans) and with
water once it reaches the land surface (meteorologists and
atmospheric chemists deal with water when it is in the
atmosphere). They have also traditionally taken a catchment
approach, treating the inputs to the catchment of water and
energy as given, and focusing on the translation of these
inputs to “outputs” of streamflow. Increasingly, however,
hydrologists are working with meteorologists to understand
the way the land surface affects the atmosphere - and hence
the “inputs” to the catchment - and with oceanographers to
contribute to the understanding of the way in which flows of
water and material to the sea affect coastal and ocean
processes. Hydrologists are also working with plant
physiologists to investigate the process of transpiration, and
with ecologists to understand the hydrological controls on

ecosystem characteristics.
30
Figure 1.1 The hydrological cycle (Ward 8t Robinson, 2000)
31
Figure 1.2 Hydrological science as a component of earth

system science (modified from National Research Council,
1991)
Central to the concept of earth system science is the idea of

cycles of energy and material. The hydrological cycle is an
obvious example, but interest has developed over the past
decade in biogeochemical cycles in general. A
biogeo-chemical cycle can be defined as the cycle of any
element or compound, through all its states and phase
changes. Attention is often focused on the cycles
32
of the key elements carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulphur and
oxygen, although it is of course possible to construct cycles
for any flux of material - including sediment. Cycles can be
evaluated at all scales, but only at the global scale are cycles
closed with no inputs to or output from the system of interest.
At smaller scales, such as the catchment or indeed continent,
there will be inputs and outputs across the system boundary.
Water plays a key role in all biogeo-chemical cycles, both as
a means of transporting material from one store to another
and as a medium in which transformations take place. One of
water’s unique features is that virtually all matter can dissolve
in it, and biological and chemical transformations can also
occur in water to alter the speciation of elements. Any
assessment of any biogeochemical cycle must therefore
consider the role of hydrological processes.
1.3 Hydrology and global

environmental change
The earth is over 4.5 billion years old, and over this entire
period has been subject to change. Geological forces include

such processes as plate tectonics, metamorphism and
vulcanism, which shape the broad pattern of land surface and
ocean. These are internal processes, essentially driven by heat
at the earth’s core. Tectonic movement and metamorphism
occur over time scales of millions of years, but the effects of
vulcanism can be immediate and catastrophic. Three sets of
external forces affect the earth system. The atmosphere,
hydro-sphere and biosphere are all driven by inputs of energy
from the sun, which varies diurnally as the earth rotates,
seasonally as the earth revolves around the sun, and as solar
33
output fluctuates (solar luminosity varies by ±0.07% over the
11-year sunspot cycle (Hoffert et al., 1988), and has varied
more over much longer time scales). The gravitational
interaction between the earth and the moon generates tides,
which vary predictably from day to day, and gravitational
interactions between the earth and other planets produce
changes in the earth’s orbit over millennial time scales which
alter the amount of solar energy received. Thirdly, meteorites
sometimes hit the earth, with occasionally very significant
consequences. Additional to these geological and external
forces are rhythms and patterns inherent in the linked
atmosphere-ocean system. These rhythms, which operate on
annual or decadal time scales, arise in some cases because of
the different rate of response of different parts of the
atmosphere-ocean system to an external forcing, and in others
because the system undergoes a step change once a small
progressive change pushes the system beyond a critical
internal threshold. The El Nino-Southern Oscillation is an
example of such a rhythm.
Superimposed onto this “natural” global environmental

change, which operates at all time scales, are the effects of

various human activities. The cultivation of wheat and barley
began in the Middle East around 10 000 years ago, and
clustered settlements began to appear at around the same
time; 7000 years ago farmers in the Indus Valley and
Mesopotamia were irrigating crops. Humans have therefore
been impacting upon their environment for many thousands
of years. However, the rate of change has been accelerating
dramatically, and Figure 1.3 shows changes in a number of
indicators of human activity since the middle of the twentieth
century. These interventions are affecting hydrological
systems in many catchments.
34
Figure 1.3 Indicators of human intervention: population,
agriculture, CO2 emissions and the exploitation of water
between 1950 and 2000. Population and agriculture data from
the FAO’s FAOSTAT database (http://apps.fao.org), CO2
emissions from fossil fuels from Marland et al (1998), CO2
emissions from land use change from Houghton (1999), water

withdrawals from Shiklomanov (1998), and numbers of
registered dams from the ICOLD database (www.icold.org).
The CO2 emissions data are available from
http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov
As Turner et al. (1990) explain, there are two components of

human-induced global environmental change.1 Systemic
changes are operating at global scales. They include climate
change due to the increasing concentration of greenhouse
gases in the atmosphere, acid rain and depletion of
stratospheric ozone. Cumulative change is the net effect of
35
many different changes occurring at different spatial scales.
Land cover change, for example, may be occurring in
different places for many different reasons, although some of
the economic drivers - such as globalisation - may be
common. Figure 1.4 conceptualises the implications of global
environmental change for the hydrological system. Changes
in catchment land cover, the use of water in the catchment,
and the
development of physical infrastructure in the catchment (such
as regulating reservoirs and flood embankments) can be seen
as cumulative global environmental change. Changes to the
inputs to the catchment - in terms of the amount of water,
energy and dissolved material - are due to systemic global
environmental change. These two types of change affect
hydrological processes within the catchment, but also feed
through the linked earth system to affect other catchments.
Changes in soil moisture, for example, due to changes in land
cover, will affect the amount of water available to be
evaporated back up into the atmosphere, and hence rainfall
downwind. Changes in the output of water and material from
a catchment to the sea affect coastal and possibly deep ocean
processes, potentially affecting regional and global climate.

Global environmental change should not therefore be seen as
just affecting the catchment: what happens in the catchment
affects global environmental change.
36
Figure 1.4 Global environmental change and the hydrological

syste
Both natural and human-induced global environmental

change affect the hydrological processes and regimes within a
catchment. The impacts of these changes, however, depend
on the characteristics of the human use of the
catchment and the ecological characteristics of the water
environment. Table 1.1 summarises some of the potential
human and environmental impacts of hydrological change:
37
the list is not exhaustive. Many of these impacts are affected
not only by hydrological change, but also by economic and
social changes altering the exposure to environmental hazard.
In the broadest terms, “hazard” is a function of both the
physical environment and the human environment: an
increase in the impact of water-related hazards, such as floody
is therefore not necessarily due to global environmental
change altering the physical environment. It may be entirely
due to increasing exposure to the hazard.
Table 1.1 Example impacts of adverse hydrological change in

the catchment
38
1.4 Hydrology in practice
Traditionally, hydrologists have taken a catchment
perspective, seeing precipitation and energy as inputs and
focusing on the characteristics of the output of streamflow.
This largely reflects hydrology’s disciplinary tradition as an
applied science, aimed at developing techniques to estimate
hydrological characteristics at a site as part of the process of
water management. Much hydrology has therefore concerned
itself with issues such as flood frequency estimation and the
stochastic generation of data, central to the sound design of
engineering works, and until at least the late 1970s most was
done by hydrologists who trained as engineers and who were
working to solve engineering problems.
Since the early 1980s the centre of gravity of hydrology has

shifted towards the geosciences, and it has been forcefully
argued that the role of hydrology is to solve the global water
balance and understand how the hydrological system works
(Dooge, 1986; Klemes, 1988; Chahine, 1992). This shift has
been driven partly by a need to understand hydrological

processes in order to manage some aspects of water more
effectively (particularly water pollution, which requires an
understanding of flow pathways), and partly by a need to
understand how changes in the catchment - and global
environmental change - affect hydrological systems.
Hydrologists have therefore worked with meteorologists,
atmospheric chemists, physicists, plant physiologists,
ecologists, soil scientists, environmental chemists,
geomorphologists, geologists and oceanographers - indeed the
whole range of environmental scientists (including physical
geographers).
39
Hydrological knowledge has advanced through a combination
of field observation and experimentation, theoretical analysis
and more recently computer modelling. The distinction
between field observations and field experimentation is that in
the latter the investigator intervenes to make something
happen, in a controlled way, whilst in the former the
investigator observes and records without intervention. Field
experiments therefore tend to be very small-scale - perhaps
just a few square metres - although there are some notable
examples of catchment-scale experiments looking at the
effects of different types of land cover change. Field
observations are undertaken at scales ranging from a few
square metres to several thousand square kilometres, although
at this larger scale the measurements are taken by remote
sensing and the definition of “field” becomes rather stretched.
For approximately 100 years hydrologists have used research
catchments to observe and study hydro-logical processes and
regimes, and during the 1980s a new type of field study -
known as meso-scale field experiments2 - began to be
undertaken. These meso-scale field experiments focus on the
links between land surface and atmosphere, and the first few
were not designed to measure streamflows at the surface: they

were designed by atmospheric scientists, who did not think in
catchment terms. Later experiments have involved close
collaboration between atmospheric and “surface” scientists,
enabling all aspects of the water and energy balance to be
measured.
Theoretical analysis has concentrated on the development of

equations describing the flow of water through saturated and
unsaturated media, and the process of evaporation. These
equations are based on the physics of the movement of mass
and energy, and were generally based not only on theoretical
40
reasoning but also in practice on detailed field observations
and experiments. Prominent examples include Darcy’s Law,
which describes the rate of flow through a porous medium,
and the Penman equation, which calculates the rate of
evaporation from meteorological data.
Since the 1980s hydrologists have increasingly used computer

simulation models both to understand how the hydrological
system works and to predict
what would happen if either the inputs to the catchment or the
characteristics of the catchment itself were to change. A
model can be defined as a simplified representation of reality,
usually in numerical form, and in the broadest sense
engineering hydrologists have been using “models” to
estimate hydrological characteristics at sites with no data for
decades. However, these engineering models have generally
been empirically-based, constructed from relationships
developed from observed data. Whilst these models may
produce good estimates within the range of their calibration
data, they do not necessarily give reliable predictions outside
this range or if conditions in the catchment change. Neither
do they provide insights into the way that hydrological system

actually functions: empirical relationships do not imply
causation. Hydrologists have therefore developed two
different types of hydrological model (Beven, 2001).
Conceptual models are based on a conceptual representation
of a catchment, usually as a series of stores. The magnitudes
of these stores and rate of outflow are determined by model
parameters (Box 1.1), which generally must be calibrated
using observed data. A “lumped” conceptual model treats the
catchment as a single unit, with the same inputs and
catchment characteristics across the
41
Box 1.1 Some basic modelling concepts
All models have parameters, which control model behaviour

and which vary from catchment to catchment. Model
parameters are estimated by calibrating the model with some
observed data. This involves adjusting the parameters until
the simulated model output approximates the observed data,
either manually or by minimising an objective function which
quantifies the difference between simulated and observed. In
principle, a calibrated model should then be checked - or
validated - against an independent set of data from the same
catchment to assess the robustness of the estimated model
parameters. In practice, several different parameter
combinations can give equally good fits to a given set of
observed data, and so techniques have been developed to
estimate confidence intervals around model predictions based
on the number of different feasible parameter sets (e.g. Freer
et al., 1996).
In broad terms, there are three main sources of error in model

simulations. First, the model may be conceptually unsound.
Second, the model parameters may be inaccurately estimated,

perhaps because many different parameter sets produce
similar simulations. Third, the input data may be inaccurate,
or available at the wrong spatial or temporal scale. Attempts
to simulate flood peaks on small catchments from monthly
total rainfall over a large region would, for example, be
doomed to failure. This last issue is very important for
hydrological modelling: the spatial and temporal scale of the
model must be consistent with the available input data, the
amount of spatial variability in process, and the intended use
of the simulations.
42
whole catchment, whilst a “distributed” conceptual model
breaks the catchment into discrete units. Physics-based
models are based on the theoretical equations of the
movement of water through the catchment, and in principle
have parameters which can be measured in the field and do
not need to be calibrated (e.g. SHE: Abbott et al., 1986 and
TOPMODEL: Beven, 1997). Physics-based models are
distributed, because the parameters of the underpinning
theoretical equations vary rapidly over space, but in practice
this variability is often greater than the feasible resolution of
field data, so parameters are often calibrated. During the late
1990s many models were designed to be applied over a large
geographic domain. These so-called “macro-models” were
intended partly to simulate hydrological behaviour in many
catchments at once, and partly as a contribution to global
climate models, but all have the common characteristic that
their parameters must be based on readily-available spatial
databases (e.g. Abdulla et al., 1996; Arnell, 1999a;
Vorosmarty et aL, 1996).
Box 1.2 Remote sensing and hydrological science

Some of the main contributions of remote sensing to

hydrology are summarised below: more details can be found
in later chapters.
• Surface properties: vegetation type and physiological

properties can be inferred through remote sensing,
and where vegetation is sparse it is also possible to
infer soil and geological characteristics.
• Store contents’, remote sensing has been used
successfully to measure snow cover extent and the
amount of water held as snow and the area of
43
standing water. It is also possible to monitor levels of
large lakes and rivers via satellite altimetry. Soil
moisture contents can be inferred in some
circumstances where vegetation is sparse, but it is
relatively straightforward to estimate in qualitative
terms the variation in soil moisture contents across
space.
• Hydrologicalfluxes’, weather radar is routinely used
to estimate rainfall, and it is possible under some
conditions to infer rainfall rates from satellite
observations of cloud brightness or temperature.
Evaporation can be inferred indirectly from
measurements of surface temperature, again under
some circumstances.
The 1980s and particularly 1990s also saw a large increase in
the use of remote sensing in hydrological science (Engman &
Gurney, 1991). Remote sensing can be defined as the
measurement of the attributes of a surface by a device
separate from the surface. Air photography is an early
example of remote sensing, but most hydrological
applications are now based on the digital radiation and

electromagnetic data collected by airborne and space-borne
platforms. Remote sensing has three uses in hydrology:
estimating the spatial extent of surface properties, estimating
the magnitudes of hydrological stores, and estimating the
fluxes of water between stores (Box 1.2). Remote sensing
techniques
are still in the early stages of development, but offer the
potential for measuring the components of the water balance,
over space and over large geographic domains.
44
Box 1.3 International hydrological research: GEWEX and the
IGBP
GEWEX is the Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment,

set up under the World Meteorological Organization’s World
Climate Research Programme (WCRP). It has components
dealing with clouds, atmospheric simulation models and
oceans, together with a number of initiatives with a strong
hydrological component. GEWEX Continental-Scale
Experiments (including GCIP, MAGS, GAME and others)
are studies looking at the water balance over a very large
spatial scale. GEWEX studies are funded by individual
countries, but are coordinated by international scientific
steering committees to an agreed science plan.
The International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) is

an initiative of the International Council of Scientific Unions,
aimed at studying in a coordinated way the relationship
between the geosphere and the biosphere. The part with the
greatest hydrological component is BAHC (Biospheric
Aspects of the Hydrological Cycle), which is concerned with
the role of vegetation, particularly in influencing evaporation,

but the IGBP also has programmes on land cover change
(LUCC), past environmental changes (PAGES) and
interactions between the land and sea (LOICZ) which have
strong hydrological components. Individual research groups
are funded by their own funding agencies, but as is the case
with GEWEX, international teams work to an agreed science
plan and are overseen by scientific steering committees.
Yet another development during the last two decades of the

twentieth century was a change in the way much hydrological
research was conducted. Although the International
45
Hydrological Decade between 1965 and 1975 stimulated
many catchment studies in many countries, most of these
studies were conducted in isolation, and usually exclusively
by hydrologists. During the 1980s and 1990s a number of
major international collaborative initiatives were developed,
which were broad in concept, global in scale and
multi-disciplinary in nature. In hydrological terms, the two
most important initiatives are the GEWEX project and the
IGBP: these are summarised in Box 1.3, and Appendix 1
gives a list of acronyms. Unesco has coordinated hydrological
research since the International Hydrological Decade through
its rolling International Hydrological Programme (IHP). This
mostly takes the form of review groups brought together to
review progress in particular areas (such as the hydrology of
the humid tropics), and Unesco has a strong capacity-building
programme aimed at increasing hydrological expertise in the
developing world. One very significant Unesco project, which
unlike most of the others involves
international coordinated research, is FRIEND (Flow
Regimes from International Experimental and Network Data),
which is concerned with understanding regional hydrological
behaviour and variability. It began in north west Europe, and

there are now FRIEND projects in parts of every continent.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) also has a
hydrological research programme, but unlike Unesco’s this is
geared towards operational hydrology, as used by water
managers. The WMO’s hydrological programme therefore
undertakes such activities as reviews of hydrological models
or forecasting techniques. At the national level, NASA’s
Earth System Science research programme has stimulated
multi-disciplinary research into the water cycle in the USA, as
have the TIGER and LOIS programmes in the UK.
46
At the more individual and catchment level, the last decade of
the twentieth century saw much closer collaboration in many
countries between hydrologists and freshwater ecologists (e.g.
Baird & Wilby, 1999), reflecting increasing concerns over the
link between hydrological change and environmental
degradation.
1.5 The structure of the book

The core of this book is divided into seven chapters, the first
four of which lead in to the remaining three. Chapter 2
introduces some basic hydrological concepts and explores the
global water balance. Chapter 3 looks at the components of
the water balance, starting with precipitation, and following
the water through interception, evaporation, infiltration into
the soil, movement through the soil, recharge to groundwater,
and the generation of streamflow. This chapter discusses in
some detail the measurement techniques available to
hydrologists, as these underpin enhanced understanding of the
hydrological system. Chapter 4 reviews the variability of
hydrological behaviour - primarily streamflow - over both

space and time. Understanding this variability is essential
before attempting to assess the effects of human changes to
the hydrological system. Chapter 5 summarises the processes
which determine the physical and chemical characteristics of
rivers and groundwater, again emphasising the considerable
variability in these characteristics over both time and space.
Chapter 6 explores the implications of changes in the

catchment - cumulative global environmental change - for
hydrological processes and regimes in the catchment. These
changes are divided into changes in land use and land cover,
47
changes in the use of water within the catchment, and changes
in the physical characteristics of the river network and water
storage. Chapter 7 examines the implications of changes in
the inputs to the catchment - systemic global environmental
change - focusing on acid deposition and climate change due
to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases. Both of
these chapters concentrate on changes to hydrological
regimes within the catchment. Chapter 8 looks at the way
hydrological processes affect the atmosphere above the
catchment and the sea downstream of the catchment, together
with the implications for the atmosphere and coastal zone of
hydrological changes within the catchment.
Figure 1.5 A structure for physical geography (Slaymaker £t

Spencer, 1998)
48
Figure 1.5 shows Slaymaker & Spencer’s (1998)
conceptualisation of a physical geography oriented around
global environmental change and the concept of
biogeochemical cycling. This book focuses on the
hydrological column (H in Figure 1.5), but touches on the
atmosphere (A: meteorology and climatology), the
lithosphere (L: geomorphology) and the biosphere (B:
ecology, plant physiology). It also encroaches into
oceanography (subsumed within H in Figure 1.5), and draws
a great deal from environmental chemistry (which cuts across
H, A, B and L). The book contains many references to
original research, most of which come from the key
international hydrological journals (Journal of Hydrology,
Water Resources Research, Hydrological Sciences Journal,
Hydrological Processes, Hydrology and Earth System
Sciences, and Nordic Hydrology): many are taken, however,
from journals centred in other disciplines, ranging from
Marine Chemistry to Plant, Cell and Environment. Many of
the international programmes mentioned in the text have
web-sites, and Appendix 2 gives a list of current (2001) web
addresses.
Finally, it is important to define here what the book does not

cover. The emphasis is very much on the hydrological aspects
of global environmental change. These hydrological effects
have consequences or impacts, for users of water and the
water environment, as summarised in Table 1.1: they will not
be discussed further in this book, and the reader is referred to
texts such as Newson (1997). Whilst the effects of some
management interventions to counter the impacts of human
activities on the water environment are summarised briefly in
Chapters 6 and 7, the bulk of the book does not discuss ways
of managing water resources and ecosystems. The final
49
chapter, however, concludes by discussing the broad-scale
implications of global environmental change for the
management of the water environment.
Notes
1
It is important to note here that although the term “global
environmental change” is rarely explicitly defined, in practice
it is used in two different ways. One use of the term embraces
all environmental change, for whatever reason, whilst the
other restricts the term to cover just change caused by human
activities. This book adopts the broader definition, because
human-induced global environmental change must be seen in
the context of “natural” environmental change.
2
These studies are not actually controlled experiments in the
classical sense: they undertake observations in a coordinated
and consistent manner.
50

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Chapter 1

Hydrology, earth system

October, and up to 24 million people were displaced. In

After each of these floods - and indeed after most of the

Floods are just one of the ways in which human society

Activities in the catchment, such as deforestation,

The aim of this book is to explore the linkages between global

1.2 Hydrology and earth system

Hydrology is broadly defined as the study of the occurrence,

with ecologists to understand the hydrological controls on

Figure 1.2 Hydrological science as a component of earth

Central to the concept of earth system science is the idea of

1.3 Hydrology and global

period has been subject to change. Geological forces include

Superimposed onto this “natural” global environmental

change, which operates at all time scales, are the effects of

emissions from land use change from Houghton (1999), water

As Turner et al. (1990) explain, there are two components of

processes, potentially affecting regional and global climate.

Figure 1.4 Global environmental change and the hydrological

Both natural and human-induced global environmental

Table 1.1 Example impacts of adverse hydrological change in

Since the early 1980s the centre of gravity of hydrology has

been driven partly by a need to understand hydrological

were not designed to measure streamflows at the surface: they

Theoretical analysis has concentrated on the development of

Since the 1980s hydrologists have increasingly used computer

do they provide insights into the way that hydrological system

All models have parameters, which control model behaviour

In broad terms, there are three main sources of error in model

Second, the model parameters may be inaccurately estimated,

Box 1.2 Remote sensing and hydrological science

Some of the main contributions of remote sensing to

• Surface properties: vegetation type and physiological

applications are now based on the digital radiation and

GEWEX is the Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment,

The International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) is

the role of vegetation, particularly in influencing evaporation,

Yet another development during the last two decades of the

behaviour and variability. It began in north west Europe, and

1.5 The structure of the book

hydrological behaviour - primarily streamflow - over both

Chapter 6 explores the implications of changes in the

Figure 1.5 A structure for physical geography (Slaymaker £t

Finally, it is important to define here what the book does not

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