CE 54200 – Hydrology

Credits and contact hours:

  • 3 credits
  • Lecture meets 3 times per week for 50 minutes per meeting for 15 weeks

Specific course information:

  • Catalog description: Meteorology; precipitation; stream flow, evaporation, and transpiration; subsurface flows, well hydraulics; runoff relations and hydrographs; elements of stream flow routing, frequency and duration studies; extreme values statistics applied to flood and drought forecasting; application of hydrologic techniques.
  • Prerequisites: None
  • Course status: Technical elective

Specific Goals for the course:

  • Student learning outcomes - Upon successful completion of this course the student shall be able to:
    • Describe the hydrologic cycle, its components and reservoirs;
    • Perform water balance of a hydrologic system;
    • Apply various hydrologic concepts to compute basic hydrologic fluxes such as infiltration, evapotranspiration and streamflow;
    • Simulate the hydrology of a watershed using HEC-HMS hydrology model;
    • Use MS Excel to perform hydrologic computations and plot hydrologic data
  •  Relationship of course to program outcomes
    • Outcome 1: An ability to identify, formulate, and solve complex engineering problems by applying principles of engineering, science, and mathematics.
    • Outcome 5: An ability to function effectively on a team whose members together provide leadership, create a collaborative and inclusive environment, establish goals, plan tasks and meet objectives.

Topics:

  • HYDROLOGIC CYCLE
    • Discussion of the hydrologic cycle, its components, processes and the continuity equation
  • PRECIPITATION
    • Vapor pressure, physics of precipitation, measurement and aerial estimation of rainfall using different methods
  • EVAPORATION/EVAPOTRANSPIRATION
    • Factors affecting evaporation, methods for computing evaporation
  • SUBSURFACE WATER
    • Properties of porous media, aquifer, Darcy’s Law, moisture characteristic curve, Richard’s equation, estimation of infiltration using different methods
  • SURFACE WATER
    • Hydrograph, baseflow separation methods, SCS CN method
  • UNIT HYROGRAPH
    • Linear systems theory, derivation and application of Unit Hydrograph using convolution integral, synthetic unit hydrographs
  • ROUTING
    • Hydrologic routing using Modified Puls method and Muskingum method
  • FLOOD FREQUENCY ANALYSIS
    • Return period, flood frequency analysis using EV1 and LP3 distributions
  • HEC-HMS MODELING
    • Development and application of HEC-HMS model
  • FLOOD MODELING
    • Application of HEC-RAS for flood modeling and mapping