This book contains seven parts. The first part deals with some aspects of rainfall analysis, including rainfall probability distribution, local rainfall interception, and analysis for reservoir release. Part 2 is on evapotranspiration and discusses development of neural network models, errors, and sensitivity. Part 3 focuses on various aspects of urban runoff, including hydrologic impacts, storm water management, and drainage systems. Part 4 deals with soil erosion and sediment, covering mineralogical composition, geostatistical analysis, land use impacts, and land use mapping. Part 5 treats remote sensing and geographic information system (GIS) applications to different hydrologic problems. Watershed runoff and floods are discussed in Part 6, encompassing hydraulic, experimental, and theoretical aspects. Water modeling constitutes the concluding Part 7. Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT), Xinanjiang, and Soil Conservation Service-Curve Number (SCS-CN) models are discussed. The book is of interest to researchers and practitioners in the field of water resources, hydrology, environmental resources, agricultural engineering, watershed management, earth sciences, as well as those engaged in natural resources planning and management. Graduate students and those wishing to conduct further research in water and environment and their development and management find the book to be of value.

This volume is a collection of a selected number of articles based on presentations at the 2005 L’Aquila (Italy) Summer School on the topic of “Hydrologic Modeling and Water Cycle: Coupling of the Atmosphere and Hydrological Models”. The p- mary focus of this volume is on hydrologic modeling and their data requirements, especially precipitation. As the eld of hydrologic modeling is experiencing rapid development and transition to application of distributed models, many challenges including overcoming the requirements of compatible observations of inputs and outputs must be addressed. A number of papers address the recent advances in the State-of-the-art distributed precipitation estimation from satellites. A number of articles address the issues related to the data merging and use of geo-statistical techniques for addressing data limitations at spatial resolutions to capture the h- erogeneity of physical processes. The participants at the School came from diverse backgrounds and the level of - terest and active involvement in the discussions clearly demonstrated the importance the scienti c community places on challenges related to the coupling of atmospheric and hydrologic models. Along with my colleagues Dr. Erika Coppola and Dr. Kuolin Hsu, co-directors of the School, we greatly appreciate the invited lectures and all the participants. The members of the local organizing committee, Drs Barbara Tomassetti; Marco Verdecchia and Guido Visconti were instrumental in the success of the school and their contributions, both scienti cally and organizationally are much appreciated.

This book presents a unified approach for modeling hydrologic processes distributed in space and time using geographic information systems (GIS). This Third Edition focuses on the principles of implementing a distributed model using geospatial data to simulate hydrologic processes in urban, rural and peri-urban watersheds. The author describes fully distributed representations of hydrologic processes, where physics is the basis for modeling, and geospatial data forms the cornerstone of parameter and process representation. A physics-based approach involves conservation laws that govern the movement of water, ranging from precipitation over a river basin to flow in a river. Global geospatial data have become readily available in GIS format, and a modeling approach that can utilize this data for hydrology offers numerous possibilities. GIS data formats, spatial interpolation and resolution have important effects on the hydrologic simulation of the major hydrologic components of a watershed, and the book provides examples illustrating how to represent a watershed with spatially distributed data along with the many pitfalls inherent in such an undertaking. Since the First and Second Editions, software development and applications have created a richer set of examples, and a deeper understanding of how to perform distributed hydrologic analysis and prediction. This Third Edition describes the development of geospatial data for use in Vflo® physics-based distributed modeling.