Baseflow residence time (often mean baseflow residence time) is a parameter useful in describing the mixing of waters from the infiltration of
precipitation
In meteorology, precipitation is any product of the condensation of atmospheric water vapor that falls under gravitational pull from clouds. The main forms of precipitation include drizzle, rain, sleet, snow, ice pellets, graupel and hail. ...
and pre-event
groundwater
Groundwater is the water present beneath Earth's surface in rock and soil pore spaces and in the fractures of rock formations. About 30 percent of all readily available freshwater in the world is groundwater. A unit of rock or an unconsolidate ...
in a
watershed
Watershed is a hydrological term, which has been adopted in other fields in a more or less figurative sense. It may refer to:
Hydrology
* Drainage divide, the line that separates neighbouring drainage basins
* Drainage basin, called a "watershe ...
. It describes the average amount of time that water within the transient water supply resides in a watershed. Many methods of determining baseflow residence time have been developed, mostly involving mathematical models using a convolution integral approach with isotopic or chemical data as the input.
[Vitvar et al., 2002. Estimation of baseflow residence times in watersheds from the runoff hydrograph recession: method and application in the Neversink watershed, Catskill Mountains, New York. ''Hydrol. Processes'' 16 1871-187]
Other methods that do not require such extensive and expensive data collection include Brutsaert and Nieber,
[Brutsaert and Nieber, 1977. Regionalized Drought Flow Hydrographs from a Mature Glaciated Plateau. ''Water Resources Research''. Vol. 13, No. 11] which uses aquifer parameters as inputs, and Vitvar et al.,
which uses the
hydrograph, stream flow hydrograph to determine
baseflow recession
Baseflow (also called drought flow, groundwater recession flow, low flow, low-water flow, low-water discharge and sustained or fair-weather runoff) is the portion of the streamflow that is sustained between precipitation events, fed to streams by d ...
parameters.
See also
*
Baseflow
Baseflow (also called drought flow, groundwater recession flow, low flow, low-water flow, low-water discharge and sustained or fair-weather runoff) is the portion of the streamflow that is sustained between precipitation events, fed to streams by d ...
*
Hydrograph
A hydrograph is a graph showing the rate of flow ( discharge) versus time past a specific point in a river, channel, or conduit carrying flow. The rate of flow is typically expressed in cubic meters or cubic feet per second (cms or cfs).
It can al ...
*
Time of concentration
References
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Hydrology