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Updated: Feb 7, 2026

Soil Lysimeter Excavation for Coupled Hydrological, Geochemical, and Microbiological Investigations
Published on: September 11, 2016
A comparison of hydrological and topological watersheds
B Burger1, J S Andrade2,3, H J Herrmann2,3
1IfB, HIT G23.1, ETH Zürich, Zürich, 8093, Switzerland. bastian.burger@bluewin.ch.
Abstract:
We introduce the hydrological watershed, a watershed where water can penetrate the soil, and compare it with the topological watershed for a two-dimensional landscape. For this purpose, we measure the fractal dimension of the hydrological watershed for different penetration depths and different grid sizes. Through finite size scaling, we find that the fractal dimension is 1.31 ± 0.02 which is significantly higher than the fractal dimension of the topological watershed. This indicates that the hydrological watershed belongs to a new universality class. We also find that, as opposed to the topological watershed, the hydrodynamic watershed can exhibit disconnected islands.
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