Richard A. Carothers

Controls of climate, topography, vegetation, and lithology on drainage density extracted from high resolution topography data

Mark Melton in 1957 found that climate, basin morphometry, and surficial variables control drainage density (Dd), but differences observed between field surveyed channels and those mapped on topographic contours or blue lines left doubts on these results. Later, several landscape evolution model and observational studies analyzed the behavior of Dd. However, only a few studies have been performed over a large number of landscapes of different characteristics and have relied on high resolution topography data. We revisit Melton’s hypothesis by using meter-resolution digital terrain models (DTMs) in 101 subbasins in the USA. We first propose a dimensionless drainage density (Ddd) metric based on the ratio of likely...

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