Introduction to learning about hydrology
Water is a fundamental need of life. Humans not only need water as all animals do, but have also adapted water systems to meet the needs and wants of their technological infrastructure. Let's begin the study of hydrology by understanding the fundamental needs for water and how those needs are met by the Bozeman municipal water supply (8:26 min).
Contents of this module
Water budgets and the water cycle
The need to manage water resources requires understanding a basic premise of watershed hydrology. The area of the landscape that captures precipitation and routes it to a water resource ultimately controls the quantity and quality of that resource. The key to management of that water resource for either humans or ecosystems (or both) is thus making effective decisions about the management of that landscape. Let's briefly review how to determine what parts of a landscape provide a water resource, using the Gallatin Valley and the Bozeman municipal water supply as an example (4:59 min).
Perhaps it is already obvious that sufficient scientific understanding of the landscape's function necessary to predict the quantity and quality of a water resource is a dauntingly complex objective. The basic concepts of hillslope hydrology provide an introduction to how hydrologists break down this complexity into a manageable collection of hydrologic processes to understand, with the hopes that the behavior of watersheds can be predicted by understanding the relative importance of these processes across the landscape. Making the connection between runoff and precipitation via hillslopes (and all that can happen in between) highlights the need to characterize the most fundamental understanding of watershed behavior, the balance of inputs, outputs, and storage that defines the water budget (7:24 min).
Finally, let's think about where water goes after exiting a watershed via runoff and how a watershed links into the larger water cycle of the planet (7:26 min).
With those basics under our belts. Let's dive into the details of learning about environmental hydrology!
Slides and other materials
Slides
Click this link to download the MS PowerPoint file
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Useful materials for further study or skill development
Basic water requirements for human activities
More information on the Bozeman municipal water supply
Video on the Bozeman municipal watershed
The full video from the USDA Forest Service about the Bozeman water supply (from 2010)