Beyond total impervious area: a new lumped descriptor of basin-wide hydrologic connectivity for characterizing urban watersheds

Dell'Aira, Francesco; Meier, Claudio I.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-29-1001-2025

Articles | Volume 29, issue 4

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-29-1001-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-29-1001-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 29, issue 4

Research article

|

25 Feb 2025

Research article |

| 25 Feb 2025

Beyond total impervious area: a new lumped descriptor of basin-wide hydrologic connectivity for characterizing urban watersheds

Francesco Dell'Aira and Claudio I. Meier

Data sets

Drainage basin delineations for selected USGS streamflow-gaging stations in Virginia J. L. Krstolic https://doi.org/10.5066/P9VO616K

Global Hydrologic Soil Groups (HYSOGs250m) for Curve Number-Based Runoff Modeling C. W. Ross et al. https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1566

Model code and software

PyHCIU - Calculate a Basin's Hydrologic-Connectivity-based Index of Urbanization Francesco Dell'Aira https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14457110

Short summary

Scientists and engineers need better indices to frame the hydrologic effects of land development. Existing approaches are not able to reflect the interactions due to the spatial arrangement of distinct land patches, which affect how much runoff is generated and how fast it can travel downstream, impacting flood response. Our novel, GIS-based modeling framework explicitly considers these aspects and is applicable to a wide range of problems, including peak-flow predictions in ungauged basins.