Water balance lab preparation

The first lab exercise is to get some practice visualizing flow nets based on surface topography and delineating watersheds using topographic maps. To be prepared, you might want to review the following video from lecture that provides a detailed example of topographic watershed delineation (13:09 min).

You will be asked to delineate a watershed using the drawing tools in Microsoft PowerPoint. Understanding how to control curved lines in PowerPoint to the degree necessary to represent watershed boundaries is a useful skill for any drawings made for presentations or other PowerPoint applications. You will want to download the following PowerPoint file if you wish to follow along with the video.

Click this link to download the MS PowerPoint file 

Let's review drawing watershed boundaries by taking full control of lines in PowerPoint (15:24 min).

Evapotranspiration is a difficult variable to measure directly at watershed scales. In the 1960s, a famous experiment at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest was conducted in an attempt to directly observe the role of transpiration in watershed water budgets. The approach was to remove and suppress vegetation growth for three years while monitoring  runoff from the catchment continuously before, during, and after the treatment. Another exercise in this laboratory is to use long-term annual precipitation and hydrograph data from Hubbard Brook to rigorously explore the effect of the vegetation removal experiment on water budgets and watershed partitioning (13:53 min).

The following document provides some more useful hints for the completion of laboratory activities.

Click this link to download the postscript PDF document