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Catchment areas may be established for the provision of services. For example, a school catchment area is the geographic area from which students are eligible to attend a local school. When a facility's capacity can only service a specific volume, the catchment may be used to limit a population's ability to access services outside that area. [11]
Watershed delineation is the process of identifying the boundary of a watershed, also referred to as a catchment, drainage basin, or river basin. It is an important step in many areas of environmental science, engineering, and management, for example to study flooding, aquatic habitat, or water pollution.
Catchment zone in Nattai, Australia containing drinking water. Catchment hydrology is the study of hydrology in drainage basins. Catchments are areas of land where runoff collects to a specific zone. This movement is caused by water moving from areas of high energy to low energy due to the influence of gravity.
Other terms for a drainage basin are catchment area, catchment basin, drainage area, river basin, water basin, [3] [4] and impluvium. [ 5 ] [ 6 ] [ 7 ] In North America, they are commonly called a watershed , though in other English-speaking places, "watershed" is used only in its original sense, that of the drainage divide line.
It includes oceanic sea drainage basins which have hydrologically coherent areas (oceanic seas are set by IHO convention). The oceans drain approximately 83% of the land in the world. The other 17% – an area larger than the basin of the Arctic Ocean – drains to internal endorheic basins.
Watersheds as optimal spanning forest have been introduced by Jean Cousty et al. [12] They establish the consistency of these watersheds: they can be equivalently defined by their “catchment basins” (through a steepest descent property) or by the “dividing lines” separating these catchment basins (through the drop of water principle ...
In marsh deltas such as the Okavango, the largest drainage area on earth, or in large lakes areas, such as the Finnish Lakeland, it is difficult to find a meaningful definition of a watershed. A bifurcation is where the watershed is effectively in a river bed, in a wetland, or underground.
When the response factor A can be determined from the characteristics of the watershed (catchment area), the reservoir can be used as a deterministic model or analytical model, see hydrological modelling. Otherwise, the factor A can be determined from a data record of rainfall and runoff using the method explained below under non-linear reservoir.