Origins of quantitative hydrology: pierre perrault,edme wariotte,and edmond h alley

摘要

Around 1550, Bernard Palissy, the famous French hydraulic engineer, concluded from simple field observa tions that water in rivers must come from precipitation. It would be more than a century later, in the 1670s and 1680s, that the French naturalist Pierre Perrault and physicist Edme Marriotte would publish experimental re sults that quantitatively verified the origin of streamflow (Chow, 1964; Biswas, 1970). In the same time period, around 1700, the English astronomer Edmond Halley advanced the field of hydrology even further by providing some of the first quantitative estimates of water storage (i.e., sinks) in multiple phases of the hydrologic cycle (Dingman, 2008).