How a river's length and discharge relate to the precipitation in its basin

摘要

The authors selected 14 representative world rivers. The authors wish to find out how a river's length and basin's precipitation relate to its discharge. This will be accomplished by dividing the discharge rate at its mouth by its length, generating the river's discharge gain per kilometer (DGPK), basically how rapidly the river gains flow as it progresses to its mouth. Then the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient (PCC) will be used to measure to what degree the DGPK correlates to the mean precipitation over the river basin over the 14 rivers studied in this paper. Since the correlation turns out to be significant, the corresponding regression line will be generated. As will be seen, a significant contribution of this paper is a simple and easy to use model that allows us to predict river discharge based on precipitation over the river's basin.