Term Project Outline

CE 394K Surface Water Hydrology
University of Texas at Austin

Hydrologic Response Unit - Concept and Implementation

by Ximing Cai

xcai@crwr.utexas.edu


Objectives: I have been keeping on reading the papers about the concept of hydrologic response unit(HRU), its principles and its implementation in hydrologic modeling. This term project may give me an opportuunity to take all those papers back, review them, and think about what I really got from them, and what is interesting to do now or in the future.

Information Sources: papers from several kinds of journals and magazines. Some related data on INTERNET and some published databases will be used for the case study.

Expected Results: I will take half-time on writing the literature review and the other half time on my own work. The literature review will focus on the following topics:

  1. The concept of hydrologic response unit (HRU) lumped approaches, zonal approaches, hydrologic response unit (HRU), representative element area (REA)
  2. The dominant controls to specific hydrologic modeling single variable effect and combined effects of the major variables in channel network, soils and land uses, topography and rainfall distribution.
  3. Scaling up from the microscale to macroscale hydrologic similarity and integration, scaling a point representation up to an element representation.
  4. Uncertainty treatment in parameterization of hydrologic modeling temporal and spatial variability and modeling uncertainty.
Based on the literature review, I hope to
  1. Propose a conceptual framework for HRU,
  2. Find a way for implementation of HRU in specific hydrologic modeling,
  3. Show a small demonstration example.

Return to the Hydrology Class Home Page