The Idiosyncrasies of Storage and Implications for Catchment Runoff (Invited)

Because water goes into storage when it rains, perhaps the entire concept of a direct rainfall-runoff process is erroneous and misleading. Perhaps the runoff generation process is merely the conversion of storage to runoff. Using this perspective as a foundation, it then becomes important to understand how catchments retain water, where this storage is distributed and what controls the distribution of this storage. There is a growing body of observational evidence that the idiosyncrasies of storage in the catchment are crucial for runoff generation. These idiosyncrasies are important enough that some hydrologists are questioning assumptions of steady state, linearity, and topographic control in existing theories and algorithms of runoff generation. For instance, thresholds that control the release of water have been identified at many scales and in many landscapes. Hysteresis in storage-runoff relationships at all scales manifest because of these thresholds. Because storage thresholds at a range of scales are now known to be important for runoff response, connectivity has become an important concept crucial to interpreting catchment runoff response. There appears to be growing acceptance of such ideas as thresholds, hysteresis and connectivity in the hydrological literature. Theoretical development and model parameterization have begun, but there remains much work to resolve these field observations. In particular, our community should strive to investigate the relevance of storage-runoff relationships partly through innovative measurement techniques and the development of model structures appropriate for the requisite testing of these theories in a diversity of landscapes.