Water on the Surface

Surface water fluxes

SURFACE WATER - this variable is used to model water on the surface of the land. If we are looking at an area with no steep gradients and fairly high potential rainfall (like in the Florida Everglades or other wetlands), then surface water can accumulate in significant amounts before it is absorbed by the soil. In that case we need to consider the infiltration process between the accumulated surface water and the underlying unsaturated layer . In most terrestrial areas with steeper slopes most of the surface water will be removed into rivers, creeks, ponds, depressions, in which it will accumulate over a layer of saturated water. Therefore there will be no infiltration in that case. Instead there will be the exchange process between the surface water and the saturated layer.

It is hard to isolate a unit of surface water without connecting it to the neighboring cells. Much of the surface water transport is due to horizontal fluxes, therefore a box-model approach will be always only approximate when modeling surface water dynamics. However with appropriate spatial and temporal scaling we can think of an aggregated unit model to represent surface water in a homogeneous cell.

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SNOW/ICE

UNSAT WATER

SAT WATER

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