Watersheds in disordered media

Frontiers in Physics

Araú⁴  S. Jr.⁵  Andrade, José⁶  Herrmann, Hans J.⁷  Schrenk, K. Julian⁸  jo, Nuno A. M.⁹ 

[1], Brazil

[2], Fortaleza, Ceará

[3]Computational Physics, Institute for Building Materials, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

[4]Departamento de Fí

[5]Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

[6]ncias, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal

[7]rica e Computacional, Faculdade de Ciê

[8]sica Teó

[9]sica, Centro de Fí

[10]sica, Universidade Federal do Ceará

关键词: Watersheds;    Drainage basin;    Fractals;    Catchment basins;    invasion percolation;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fphy.2015.00005

学科分类：物理（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

What is the best way to divide a rugged landscape? Since ancient times, watersheds separating adjacent water systems that flow, for example, toward different seas, have been used to delimit boundaries. Interestingly, serious and even tense border disputes between countries have relied on the subtle geometrical properties of these tortuous lines. For instance, slight and even anthropogenic modifications of landscapes can produce large changes in a watershed, and the effects can be highly nonlocal. Although the watershed concept arises naturally in geomorphology, where it plays a fundamental role in water management, landslide, and flood prevention, it also has important applications in seemingly unrelated fields such as image processing and medicine. Despite the far-reaching consequences of the scaling properties on watershed-related hydrological and political issues, it was only recently that a more profound and revealing connection has been disclosed between the concept of watershed and statistical physics of disordered systems. This review initially surveys the origin and definition of a watershed line in a geomorphological framework to subsequently introduce its basic geometrical and physical properties. Results on statistical properties of watersheds obtained from artificial model landscapes generated with long-range correlations are presented and shown to be in good qualitative and quantitative agreement with real landscapes.

【 授权许可】

CC BY