Climatic controls on the length and shape of the world's drainage basins

Singer, Michael Bliss ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6899-2224, Grieve, Stuart W. D., Chen, Shiuan-An and Michaelides, Katerina 2024. Climatic controls on the length and shape of the world's drainage basins. Geophysical Research Letters 51 (24) , e2024GL111220. 10.1029/2024GL111220

Preview

PDF - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract

Climate is thought to affect the structure and evolution of drainage basins, but it is not clear how climate impacts the power law scaling between channel length and drainage area. Since climate controls runoff, streamflow, and erosion regimes, we looked for dependency of drainage basin morphometrics on climate within a near-global data set. We show that increasingly arid regions have longer channels and narrower drainage basins, and power law scaling between channel length and basin area (Hack's Law) increases monotonically with aridity. We suggest these results arise due to downstream channel extension by rare large floods that erode channels into previously unchanneled terrain, yielding a morphometric signature in drylands that is preserved over long timescales due to a lack of subsequent topographic smoothing. This new understanding of drainage basin morphometrics on Earth may be used to inform interpretations of past climates on our planet and other solar system bodies.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Earth and Environmental Sciences
Publisher:	Wiley Open Access
ISSN:	0094-8276
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	20 November 2024
Date of Acceptance:	30 October 2024
Last Modified:	16 Jan 2025 11:01
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/174179

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item