Climatic Controls on the Length and Shape of the World's Drainage Basins

Abstract

Climate is thought to affect the structure and evolution of drainage basins, but it is not clear how climate impacts the power law scaling between channel length and drainage area. Since climate controls runoff, streamflow, and erosion regimes, we looked for dependency of drainage basin morphometrics on climate within a near-global data set. We show that increasingly arid regions have longer channels and narrower drainage basins, and power law scaling between channel length and basin area (Hack's Law) increases monotonically with aridity. We suggest these results arise due to downstream channel extension by rare large floods that erode channels into previously unchanneled terrain, yielding a morphometric signature in drylands that is preserved over long timescales due to a lack of subsequent topographic smoothing. This new understanding of drainage basin morphometrics on Earth may be used to inform interpretations of past climates on our planet and other solar system bodies.