What happens after the catchment caught the storm? Hydrological processes at the small, semi-arid Weatherley catchment, South-Africa

摘要

The knowledge of water flow pathways and residence times in a catchment areessential for predicting the hydrological response to a rain storm event.Different experimental techniques are available to study these processes,which are briefly reviewed in this paper. To illustrate this, recentfindings from the Weatherley catchment a 1.5 km2 semi-arid headwater inSouth-Africa, are reported in this paper. Beside classical hydrometricmeasurements of precipitation and runoff different experimental techniqueswere applied to explore flow paths (i.e. soil moisture and groundwatermeasurements, natural tracers, and 2-D electrical resistivity tomographies(ERT)).