Effects of oscillatory forcing on hydrologic systems under extreme conditions: a mathematical modeling approach

At the large watershed scale, we emphasize the effects of flow through a river network on streamflow under dry conditions. An immediate consequence of assuming dry conditions is that evapotranspiration causes flow in the river network to exhibit oscillations. When all links in the river network combine their flow patterns, the oscillations interact in ways that change the timing and amplitude of the streamflow waves at the watershed outlet. The geometric shape of the river network is particularly important, so we develop an analytic solution for streamflow which emphasizes that importance.

Doing hydrology backward is a strategy recently developed by several researchers to deal with uncertainty in measurements of forcing terms applied to hydrologic models. The strategy has also been applied to resolve the assumption of homogeneity on realistic catchments that exhibit many heterogeneous properties. In this work, we demonstrate hydrology in the backward direction applied to two examples: using streamflow at the catchment scale to determine runoff at the hillslope scale and using the hillslope runoff to infer the applied evapotranspiration forcing under the assumption of dry conditions. In order to work across scales, we utilize the analytic solution for streamflow at the outlet of a river network. At the hillslope scale, we develop a soil model to create fluxes consistent with observed soil processes.