Self organizing hydrological processes in a runoff source area

Understanding the hydrology of runoff source areas is crucial for predicting floods and evaluating chemical transport. Numerically modeling water fluxes in the source areas is quite complex. However, the self-organization of complex hydrological systems makes it possible to simplify watershed models by considering the landscape functions. The limitation is that input values are not known a priori. This study seeks to find the soil physical parameters governing the hydrology of runoff source areas in humid climates and use them in a surrogate simulation model to predict the runoff and the perched water table height. The site chosen was a 5.4-ha, periodically saturated runoff source area with a shallow perched water table and a humid temperate climate. The only inflow was from precipitation. Perched water table depths at five locations and the outflow were measured continuously. Measurements showed that the outflow was negligible 24 h after a rain event. It indicated that a quasi-static equilibrium had been established, in which the capillary pressure decreased linearly with depth to zero at the shallow groundwater. The soil–water retention function determined the soil water distribution and the drainable porosity. Runoff was generated by saturation excess and equaled the rainfall minus the empty pore volume. Based on these observations, a simple spreadsheet-based surrogate model was developed to calculate the air-filled pore volume by accounting for daily precipitation and evaporation. The surrogate model accurately predicted daily discharge and water table height using climatic data and a literature-based water retention function. In our case, the quasi-static equilibrium was restored within a day. Thus, the small-scale nonlinear physics that determines the soil's water flow rate before equilibrium is reached were irrelevant when the time step is one day. Studies in similar runoff source areas could utilize this approach and create their specific surrogate models