Surface water hydrology

Abstract

Steady progress in many areas of deterministic and stochastic hydrology has occurred in the period 1975–78. In almost every instance, the progress reported here is the result of work continuing from an earlier period and not the result of technical breakthrough during the past four years. With regard to deterministic hydrology, important advances have been made relative to: assessment of spatial variability in the sub‐processes of infiltration, surface depression storage, and surface and sub‐surface runoff; development of simplified methods of flood routing in rivers, reservoirs and storm drain systems; application of conceptual models to hydrologic‐environmental problems; selection of flood frequency models and the analysis of parameter uncertainty; and preliminary assessment of flood frequency methods for ungaged watersheds. In the field of stochastic hydrology, important advances have been made regarding: the Hurst phenomenon; Box‐Jenkins modeling; Kaiman filtering; simulation methods based on Bayesian and multivariate models; spectral methods applied to watershed response; and reservoir theory.