Weak relationships between landforms and hydro-climatologic processes: a case study in Haiti

Abstract

Abstract Our dependence on the continental water cycle (CWC) is such that we clearly need to improve our understanding of its issues from a multidisciplinary perspective. We assess the water resources in an understudied country, Haiti, to estimate the geomorphological (8 variables), hydrological (7), and climatological (7) behaviors of the main (26) watersheds. This generated almost exhaustive knowledge of the surface and sub-surface components of the CWC. In this paper, we intend to integrate these components into a synthetic and coherent view of the environment by looking for relationships between each other. We explore the correlations between several variables (including daily rainfall, river discharge, and river network metrics) of the pre-mentioned water components using robust and rigorous statistical analyses. We found a significant yet weak (spatiotemporal) correlation between the geomorphologic and climatologic components (RV test comparing two datasets with permutations, p-value = 10−3). Some partial, weak, and contingent relationships between specific geomorphologic, hydrologic, and climatologic behaviors were apparent too. The final comparison between atmosphere, hydrosphere, and geosphere in Haiti consists in the definition of four watershed categories showing strongly differentiated water cycle behaviors in the country, thus suggesting developing integrated mechanistic models for a multidisciplinary management of the CWC.