As we advance in our learning, I realized that we go more and more indebt into things. For Geography, I always thought that the water cycle was simply just the evaporation of water, formation of clouds, then rain. Although this still holds true, there are now many factors that we know that have to be taken into consideration before this “simple” process can take place. I also did not know that equations and graphs are actually constructed just to study the rain and its effects. Also, it did not occur to me that so many factors could cause a change in the storm hydrograph. Factors including: drainage density, shape of basin, steepness of slope, amount of rain, presence of vegetation and rock permeability. The range of these factors is so great that it is hard to imagine that the difference of something as minute as rock permeability as compared to something as large as drainage density can both have an effect on the hydrograph. Moreover, a simple tweak in only one factor such as the presence of vegetation can actually change the hydrograph by quite a lot. I cannot imagine how much thought has to be put in just to construct a graph that has majority of its factors different from the original graph. Through the learning of these factors, I found out that some things could be inferred from as long as you knew the definition of the term and some background knowledge. For example, the steepness of a slope. From basic knowledge we know that the steeper a slope is, the faster things can roll down. Thus, we then infer that the faster the rain droplets flow down the hill, the shorter is the basin lag time as the river would peak faster. There are some things that we can easily infer when we are studying, we just need to dig out the necessary background information and would be able to arrive at the conclusion.

Janell