Fractal River Basins
Chance and Self-Organization

This book provides a theoretical basis to the arrangement of river basins and networks.

Ignacio Rodríguez-Iturbe (Author), Andrea Rinaldo (Author)

9780521004053, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 27 August 2001

570 pages, 347 b/w illus. 7 colour illus.
25.1 x 19.6 x 3.3 cm, 1.13 kg

' … a pleasure to read … the book is written in a clear and fluent manner and should render the topic accessible not only to members of the two research communities addressed - hydrologists and physicists - but also to graduate students intending to work in this field. It may also be useful as a source of introductory material and examples for a rather specialized course on complex systems.' Ohard Levy, Physics Today

This book considers river basins and drainage networks in the light of their scaling and multi-scaling properties, and the dynamics responsible for their development. The hydrology of river basins, and prediction of their growth, demands knowledge of a range of temporal and spatial scales. The core of Fractal River Basins is the search for the hidden order of these temporal and spatial variabilities in river basins, despite variations in size, climate and geology. The commonality of branching networks to other natural phenomena will make this book applicable to a wide range of disciplines. Hydrologists and geomorphologists will find that this book opens up the important topic of the fractal structure of networks at an accessible level. Mathematicians and physicists will appreciate the application of the theory to this aspect of the earth sciences. Comprehensive, well illustrated and with many real-world examples Fractal River Basins, will be useful to researchers and students alike.

1. A view of river basins
2. Fractal characteristics of river basins
3. Multifractal characteristics of river basins
4. Optimal channel networks: minimum energy and fractal structures
5. Self-organized fractal river networks
6. On landscape self-organization
7. Geomorphological hydrologic response
8. References.

Subject Areas: Limnology [freshwater RBKF], Geological surface processes [geomorphology RBGD], Geophysics [PHVG]