水问题论坛——2025年第16回(总第474回)

报告题目:Simplifying and Improving an Integrated Theory of the Catchment to Predict the Water Balance

报告人:Allen Hunt

报告时间:20256181000-12:00

报告地点:中国科学院地理资源所A0901会议室

报告摘要:

Catchment science has three interrelated components: 1) the shape of the land surface, which collects the water, 2) plants that use water to produce biomass, and 3) the water itself, which changes the land, creates soil, and feeds the plants. Using inadequate theory leads to degraded predictions. While surface water flow only erodes a catchment, subsurface water flow is the basis for plant transpiration as well as soil formation. Solutes carried along these flow paths and the growth of the plants themselves follow rates that are slower than water flow, guided by paths of minimum resistance. The science that best describes these paths is called percolation theory (PT). Scaling relations from PT yield expressions for soil depth and plant growth in terms of the complementary (i.e., they sum to P) fluxes, ET and Q. Since plants cannot grow without water, but can scarcely grow without soil, there is a partitioning of P between soil and plants that maximizes plant productivity. The hypothesis that plants have actually evolved to exploit this maximum, provides an ecological basis for solving the water balance with all its associated benefits. These include improved predictions of streamflow elasticity as well as tree species richness in terms of net primary productivity. In our investigations, the predictions for streamflow elasticity were sufficiently accurate to generate predictive results for the dominant influences on drainage basin storage across scales from a few square kilometers to the world's largest drainage basins.

报告人简介:

Allen Hunt received his Ph.D. in 1983 in theoretical physics, studying transport in disordered systems at the University of California, Riverside. He later had postdoctoral research appointments in surface and subsurface hydrology, a second education with Master’s degree in Geology (arid-land geomorphology), and a visiting appointment in climate dynamics at the USA Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Before coming to Wright State University, where he has been full Professor since 2007, and University Professor since 2021, he spent a year and a half as program director in hydrologic sciences at the USA National Science Foundation. He has over 150 refereed publications, and edited three books (e.g.,Hydrogeology,Chemical Weathering and Soil Formation,AGU Wiley and written two others (e.g.,Percolation Theory for Flow in Porous Media LNP Springer).



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