Abstract

Topography is often one of the major controls on the spatial pattern of saturated areas, which in turn is a key to understanding much of the variability in soils, hydrological processes, and stream water quality. The topographic wetness index (TWI) has become a widely used tool to describe wetness conditions at the catchment scale. With this index, however, it is assumed that groundwater gradients always equal surface gradients. To overcome this limitation, we suggest deriving wetness indices based on simulations of distributed catchment models. We compared these new indices with the TWI and evaluated the different indices by their capacity to predict spatial patterns of saturated areas. Results showed that the model-derived wetness indices predicted the spatial distribution of wetlands significantly better than the TWI. These results encourage the use of a dynamic distributed hydrological model to derive wetness index maps for hydrological landscape analysis in catchments with topographically driven groundwater tables. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords

Topographic wetness index; Distributed hydrological model; Spatial patterns; Saturated areas; Wetlands; Landscape analysis

Published in

Journal of Hydrology
2009, Volume: 373, number: 1-2, pages: 15-23
Publisher: ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

SLU Authors

• Bishop, Kevin

  • Department of Aquatic Sciences and Assessment, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

• Laudon, Hjalmar

  • Department of Forest Ecology and Management, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG6 Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all


UKÄ Subject classification

Food Science


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2009.03.031

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/61628