Published February 19, 2014
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Advancing catchment hydrology to deal with predictions under change

Creators

  • 1. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
  • 2. University of Arizona
  • 3. University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
  • 4. École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
  • 5. ETH Zurich
  • 6. Vienna University of Technology
  • 7. Russian Academy of Sciences
  • 8. Johns Hopkins University
  • 9. Max Planck Society
  • 10. Delft University of Technology
  • 11. University of Central Florida
  • 12. University of Bristol
  • 13. Utrecht University
  • 14. UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education
  • 15. Deltares

Description

Throughout its historical development, hydrology as an earth science, but especially as a problem-centred engineering discipline has largely relied (quite successfully) on the assumption of stationarity. This includes assuming time invariance of boundary conditions such as climate, system configurations such as land use, topography and morphology, and dynamics such as flow regimes and flood recurrence at different spatio-temporal aggregation scales. The justification for this assumption was often that when compared with the temporal, spatial, or topical extent of the questions posed to hydrology, such conditions could indeed be considered stationary, and therefore the neglect of certain long-term non-stationarities or feedback effects (even if they were known) would not introduce a large error.
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