Whether processes in the natural world are dependent or independent of the scale at which they operate is one of the major issues in hydrologic science. In this volume, leading hydrologists present their views on the role of scale effects in hydrologic phenomena occurring in a range of field settings, from the land surface to deep fractured rock. Self-contained and thought-provoking chapters cover both theoretical and applied hydrology. They provide critical insights into important topics such as general circulation models, floods, river networks, vadose zone processes, groundwater transport, and fluid flow through fractured media. This book is intended as an accessible introduction for graduate students and researchers to some of the most significant questions and challenges that will face hydrologic science in the twenty-first century.

List of contributors; Preface; 1. Scale analyses for land-surface hydrology Eric F. Wood; 2. Hillslopes, channels, and landscape scale William E. Dietrich and David R. Montgomery; 3. Scaling in river networks Andrea Rinaldo and Ignacio Rodríguez-Iturbe; 4. Spatial variability and scale invariance in hydrologic regionalization Vijay K. Gupta and Edward C. Waymire; 5. An emerging technology for scaling field soil-water behavior Donald R. Nielson, Jan W. Hopmans and Klaus Reichardt; 6. Scaling invariance and the Richards equation Garrison Sposito; 7. Scaling of the Richards equation and its application to watershed modeling R. Haverkamp, J.-Y. Parlange, R. Cuenca, P. J. Ross and T. S. Steenhuis; 8. Scale issues of heterogeneity in vadose-zone hydrology T.-C. J. Yeh; 9. Stochastic modeling of scale-dependent macrodispersion in the vadose zone David Russo; 10. Dilution of nonreactive solutes in heterogeneous porous media Vivek Kapoor and Peter Kitanidis; 11. Analysis of scale effects in large-scale solute-transport models Roger Beckie; 12. Scale effects in fluid flow through fractured geologic media Paul A. Hsieh; 13. Correlation, flow, and transport in multiscale permeability fields Shlomo P. Neuman and Vittorio Di Federico; 14. Conditional simulation of geologic media with evolving scales of heterogeneity Yoram Rubin and Alberto Bellin; Index.