The Drainage Basin Hydrological Cycle
Rabin karmakar
Dept. of geography
Raghunathpur college
Water does not come into or leave planet earth. Water is continuously transferred
between the atmosphere and the oceans. This is known as the global
hydrological cycle. This system is a closed system. There are no inputs or
outputs.
The drainage basin hydrological system is a local open system. A drainage basin
is an area of land drained by a river and its tributaries (river system). It includes
water found in the water table and surface run-off. There is an imaginary line
separating drainage basins called a watershed. Usually, this is a ridge of high
land. The red line in Figure 1 shows the watershed for a river basin. Any
precipitation that falls on the other side of the watershed will flow into a river in
the adjacent river basin..
Figure 1. A drainage basin and its watershed.
The drainage basin hydrological cycle may be defined as a single river
basin bounded by its own watershed and the sea. The drainage basin
hydrological cycle is an open system. This means it has inputs and outputs.
Energy from the sun and precipitation (including rain and snow) enter the
system and water leaves it.
This open system has a range of inputs, outputs, stores, transfers and
flows.
Figure 2. The drainage basin hydrological system
Inputs include precipitation (including rain and snow) and solar energy for evaporation.
Outputs move moisture out of the drainage basin and include evaporation and
transpiration from vegetation (together known as evapotranspiration), run-off into
the sea and percolation of water to underlying rock strata into underground
stores.
Stores include puddles, rivers, lakes (surface storage), glaciers, soil storage and
groundwater storage along with water stored on vegetation (interception) following
precipitation.
Transfers or flows include percolation, overland flow, infiltration, stemflow, throughflow
and overland flow.
Key Terms
There are lots of keywords that you need to learn and understand for this section. The
key terms you need to understand are listed below.
Inputs – water coming into the system
Precipitation – all forms of moisture that reach the Earth’s surface e.g. rain, snow, sleet
and hail.
Storage – water stored in the system
precipitation lands on buildings, vegetation and concrete before it reaches the soil. Interception
storage is only temporary as it is often quickly evaporated.
Vegetation storage – this is water taken up by vegetation. It is all the moisture in vegetation at
any one time.
Surface storage – the total volume of water held on the Earth’s surface in lakes, ponds and
puddles.
Interception – this is when
Groundwater storage – the storage of water underground in permeable rock strata.
Channel storage -the water held in a river or stream channel.
Flows and Processes – water moving from one place to another
Baseflow – water that reaches the channel largely through slow throughflow and from
permeable rock below the water table.
.
Channel flow – the movement of water within the river channel. This is also called a river’s
discharge.
Groundwater flow – the deeper movement of water through underlying permeable rock strata
below the water table. Limestone is highly permeable with lots of joints and can lead to faster
groundwater flow.
Infiltration – the downward movement of water into the soil surface.
Interflow – water flowing downhill through permeable rock above the water table.
Percolation – the gravity flow of water within the soil.
Stemflow – water running down a plant stem or tree trunk.
Surface Runoff – the movement of water over the surface of the land, usually when the ground
is saturated or frozen or when precipitation is too intense from infiltration to occur.
Note – request to take reference of your enhlish & Bengali books.
