Hydrology

Catalog description

This course focuses on developing advanced skills needed to analyze and characterize the relationship between rainfall and runoff needed for studies, facilities planning, and complex designs. Topics include the characteristics of precipitation, watershed characteristics and data, runoff generation, the transformation of surface runoff to streamflow, probabilistic approaches to determining peak flood flows, deterministic hydrologic modeling using standard software, transfer function modeling of rainfall-temperature-streamflow relationship, The course makes extensive use of publicly available GIS-based datasets and tools to characterize watersheds. A term project in which students develop a calibrated model of a watershed synthesizes most of the course topics into one project.