CENGR511 – Hydrology 1

MODULE NO. 1
CHAPTER 1
HYDROLOGIC CYCLE

Learning Objectives:

1. Understand the concept of hydrologic cycle.

2. Discuss the watershed and its component.

3. Define Water Balance.

4. Calculate Water Balance problems.

Introduction

Hydrology treats of the waters of the Earth, their occurrence, circulation, and distribution,
their chemical and physical properties, and their reaction with their environment, including their
relation to living things. The domain of hydrology embraces the full life history of water on Earth.
Engineering hydrology includes those segments of the field pertinent to planning, design, and
operation of engineering projects for the control and use of water. The boundaries between
hydrology and other earth sciences such as meteorology, oceanography, and geology are indistinct.
Likewise, the distinctions between engineering hydrology and other branches of applied hydrology
are vague. Indeed, engineers owe much of their present knowledge of hydrology to agriculturists,
foresters, meteorologists, geologists, and others in a variety of fields.

Hydrology is a multidisciplinary subject that deals with the occurrence, circulation,

storage, and distribution of surface water and ground water on the Earth. It also includes chemical
and physical properties of water and its reaction with the environment.

Hydrology is used in engineering mainly in connection with the design and operation of
hydraulic structures. What flood flows can be expected over a spillway, at a highway culvert, or
in an urban storm drainage system? What reservoir capacity is required to assure adequate water
for irrigation or municipal water supply during droughts? What effect will reservoirs, levees, and
other control works exert on flood flows in a stream? These are typical questions that the
hydrologist is expected to answer. Hence, many civil engineers are called upon for occasional
hydrologic studies. It is probable that these civil engineers deal with a large number of projects
and a greater financial budget than the specialist do. In any event, it seems that knowledge of the
fundamentals of hydrology is an essential part of civil engineer’s training.
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History of Hydrology

Early History
• 4000 B.C. – A dam was built across the Nile and later a canal for fresh water was
constructed between Cairo and Suez.
• A.D. 97 – Streamflow measurement techniques were first attempted in the water system of
Rome.
• 17th Century – The first recorded measurements of rainfall and surface flow were made by
Perrault.
• 17th Century – Halley (1656-1742), English astronomer, used a small pan to estimate
evaporation from the Mediterranean Sea.
• 17th Century – Mariotte gaged the velocity of flow in the Seine River.
• 18th Century – Form the basis for Modern Hydraulics and Fluid Measurement (Bernoulli’s
Theorem, Pitot tube and the Chezy Formula)
• 1867 – Discharge measurements were organized on the Rhine River at Basel
• 1888 – The U.S. Geological Survey set up the first systematic program of flow
measurement in the US on Mississippi.
• 19th Century – Darcy’s Law of flow in porous media, the Dupuit-Thiem well formula, and
the Hagen-Poisuille capillary flow equation were developed.
• 19th Century – In surface water hydrology, many flow formulas and measuring instrument
were developed.
• 19th Century – Beginning of systematic stream gaging.
• 1900-1930 – Chow (1964) named this period as Period of Empiricism because of the large
number of empirical formulas.

Modern History
• 1930-1950 – Chow (1964) named this period as Period of Rationalization
• 1932 – Sherman’s Unit Hydrograph
• 1933 – Horton’s Infiltration Theory
• 1935 – Theis’s Non-Equilibrium Equation in Well Hydraulics
• 1958 – Gumble proposed the use of extreme – value distributions for frequency analysis
of hydrologic data.
• 1950s-1960s – Tremendous increase of urbanization following World War II in the United
States and Europe that leads to better method of predicting peak flows from floods.

Computer Advances
• 1960s-1970s – The introduction of digital computer in Hydrology
• 1966 – The comprehensive hydrologic model was developed by a group at Stanford
University called Stanford Watershed Model. This model simulates all of the major
processes in the hydrologic cycle.
• 1970s-1980s – The evaluation and delineation of floodplain boundaries became a major
function of hydrologist.
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• 1973 – U.S. ACOE Hydrologic Engineering Developed HEC-1. This model simulates
floods from rainfall data using simple loss function and unit hydrographs.
• 1976 – A companion model HEC-2 was developed by the U.S. ACOE, performs water
surface profile computations for a given stream geometry and peak flow rates.
• 1995 – HEC-RAS (Hydraulic Modeling). HEC-RAS model can be used to evaluate water
surface profiles expected to occur based on defined recurrence frequency flows.
• 1998 – HEC-HMS (Hydrologic Modeling). HEC-HMS are used to simulate or calculate
the resulting storm hydrograph (discharge vs. time) from a well-defined watershed area of
a given pattern of rainfall intensity.

The Hydrologic Cycle

Hydrologic Cycle is a continuous process in which water is evaporated from water surfaces
and the oceans, moves inland as moist air masses, and produces precipitation that falls from cloud
onto the land surface of the Earth is dispersed to the hydrologic cycle via several ways.

For better understanding, figure shows the hydrologic cycle with different hydrologic
processes.

The Hydrologic Cycle

The concept of hydrologic cycle is a useful point from which to begin the study of
hydrology. The cycle is visualized as it begins with the evaporation of water from the oceans. The
resulting vapor is transported by moving air masses. Under the proper conditions, the vapor,
through condensation, is condensed to form clouds, which in turn may result to
precipitation(rainfall). The precipitation which falls upon land is dispersed in several ways. The
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greater part is temporarily retained in the soil near where it falls and is ultimately returned to the
atmosphere by evaporation and transpiration through plant tissues and leaves.
Evapotranspiration is the term for the combined evaporation and transpiration.
Some water enters the soil system as infiltration, which is a function of soil moisture
condition and soil type, and may re-enter channels later as interflow or may percolate
(percolation) to recharge the shallow groundwater that can be pumped for water supply to
agricultural and municipal water system.
The remaining portion of precipitation becomes overland flow or direct runoff, which
flows generally in a down-gradient direction to accumulate in local streams that then flow to rivers
or back to oceans. Surface and ground waters flow from higher elevations toward lower elevations
and may eventually discharge to the ocean, especially after large rainfall event.
Furthermore, the hydrologic process sublimation happens in countries where there are
snows. Sublimation is the process in which ice or snow goes from a solid to a gas without turning
into liquid. It occurs more often in low humidity and dry winds.
The cycle also emphasizes the four major hydrologic processes: Precipitation, Evaporation
and Transpiration, Surface Streamflow or Direct Runoff, and Groundwater.

Watershed

Watershed is a contiguous area that drains to an outlet, such that precipitation that falls
within the watershed runs off through that single outlet. The term catchment is sometimes used
synonymously for the just the surface portion of the watershed.
Watershed or basin area is an important physiographic property that determines the volume
of runoff to be expected from a given rainfall event that falls over the sea. From figure below, the
black broken line shows the watershed divide. It is the loci of points that separate two adjacent
watersheds, which then drain into different outlets. The area encompassed by the divide is the
watershed area. Runoff originates at higher elevation (starts from the watershed divide, usually
ridges) and generally move towards the lowest elevations, usually on the nearest stream in a down-
gradient direction.

The Watershed
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What is the function of Watershed?

Watershed is the basic hydrologic unit within which all measurements, calculations, and
predictions are made in hydrology. The following are the conditions occur in a watershed due to
hydrological processes:

1. The rainfall rate over a watershed area is less than the rate of infiltration and if there is ample
storage in soil moisture, then direct runoff from the surface and resulting streamflow will be
zero.

2. If, on the other hand, antecedent or previous rainfall has filled soil storage and if the rainfall
rate is so large that infiltration and evaporation can be neglected, then the volume of surface
runoff will be equal to the volume of rainfall.

In most cases, however, the conditions fall somewhere between the limitations, and must
carefully measure or calculate more than one component of the cycle to predict watershed
response.
In general, the larger the watershed area, the greater the surface runoff rate, the greater
the overland flow rate, the greater the streamflow rate.

Water Balance

The basic component of the hydrologic cycle includes precipitation, evaporation

evapotranspiration, infiltration, overland flow, streamflow, and ground water flow. The movement
of water (rainfall and runoff) through various phases of the hydrologic cycle varies greatly in time
and space, giving rise to extremes of floods and droughts. In some cases, it is possible to perform
a water budget calculation in order to predict changes in storage to be expected based on inputs
and outputs from the system as shown in the figure below.

Flow of water in and out of the system

If the input (precipitation/rainfall) is equal to the amount of output (evapotranspiration),

the water is balance. If input is greater than output, there is a positive balance, meaning there is a
possibility that flood may occur within a watershed or within that community, otherwise, drought
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may occur. An example of this is a scenario in a small urban parking lot, as rainfall accumulates
on the surface, the surface detention, or storage, slowly increases and eventually becomes outflow
from the system. Neglecting evaporation for the period of input, and assuming a long rainfall time
period, all input rainfall eventually becomes outflow from the area. The difference between inflow
to the parking lot and outflow at any time represents the change in storage. Thus, the total storage
volume that is eventually released from the area is equal to the accumulated difference in inflow
volume and outflow volume.
The same concept can be applied to small basin or large watersheds, with the added
difficulty that all loss terms in the hydrologic budget may not be known.

Mathematical equation of water budget:

P – R – G – E – T = ∆S Eq.1

P + I – O – E = ∆S Eq.2

where:
P = precipitation
R = surface runoff
G = ground water flow
E = evaporation T = transpiration I = inflow
O = outflow
∆S = change in storage in a specified time period

Note:
• Infiltration, is a loss from the surface system and a gain to ground water, and thus
cancels out from the overall budget equation.
• The units of inches(mm) represent a volume of water when multiplied by the surface
area of the watershed.
• There are two ways of denoting the volume of water that is added, either as a flow rate
for a specified time (recall flow rate topic in Hydraulics Engineering II - Fluid Dynamics)
or as a water depth across an area.

Volume = (flow rate) (time) = (depth) (watershed area)

Units in English or Metric:

English Metric
Flow rate cu.ft/sec cu.m/sec
Time Seconds, days, month
Depth inches mm
Area acres, sq.mi sq.km
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To convert from a flow to a change in water depth, rearrange the equation above and
multiply by necessary conversion factors:

(𝐟𝐥𝐨𝐰 𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞)(𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞)(𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐟𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐫)

depth = Eq.3
𝐰𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐡𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐚

Conversion factor:

(30 days/month) (24hr/day) (3600sec/hr) (1 acre/43,560 ft²) (12 in./ft)

1 cu.ft./sec ≈ 1.008 ac-in

Sample Problems

1. Water Balance in a Lake

For a given month, a 300-acre lake has 15 ft³/s of inflow, 13 ft³/s of outflow, and a total
storage increase of 16 ac-ft. A USGS gage next to the lake recorded a total of 1.3 in precipitation
for the lake for the month. Assuming that infiltration loss is insignificant for the lake, determine
the evaporation loss, in inches, over the lake for the month.

2. Water Balance in a Swimming Pool

A swimming pool (20ft x 20ft x 5ft) has small leak at the bottom. Measurements of
rainfall, evaporation, and water level are taken daily for 10 days to determine what should be
done for repair. Estimate the average daily leakage out of the swimming pool in ft³/day.
Assume the pool is exactly 5ft (60 inches) deep at the end of the day 1.

Day Evaporation Rainfall Measured Level

(inches) (inches) (inches)

1 0.5 60

2 0 1.0

3 0.5

4 0 2.0

5 0.5

6 0.5

7 0 4.0

8 0.5

9 0.5

10 0.5 52