Hydrogeomorphology

Hydrogeomorphology has been defined as “an interdisciplinary science that focuses on the interaction and linkage of hydrologic processes with landforms or earth materials and the interaction of geomorphic processes with surface and subsurface water in temporal and spatial dimensions.”[1] The term 'hydro-geomorphology’ designates the study of landforms caused by the action of water.

Hydrogeomorphology describes and evaluates the environment, in which water circulates, thus providing the information to understand the situation and to make the proper decisions.

Therefore, there is need to extrapolate the results of few small subsystems to other hydrologically and geomorphologically similar basins, which mostly remain ungauged for want of enormous resource and time involved in instrumentation and monitoring them.

Earlier geomorphologists were bounded to use different unconventional approach to evaluate the characteristics of rivers and drainage basins to get proper idea of various aspects of the water crisis.

Thus hydrological criteria not only assist the geomorphologists to evaluate the hydrogeomorphic characteristics of a drainage basin also facilitate their extrapolation in space and time.

Example of a feedback effect in hydrogeomorphology: this river in Addilal (Ethiopia) is incising, due to reforestation on the upper slopes, hence much less sediment is brought in and the river erodes its own bed - this is called "clear water effect"