Explain why the drainage Basin can be described as a complex open system (of input, throughputs, stores and output) and why it is so important that man understands how water travels through this system?

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Geography Higher                Drainage Basin Essay

Question: Explain why the drainage Basin can be described as a complex open system (of input, throughputs, stores and output) and why it is so important that man understands how water travels through this system?

The drainage basin can be described as a drainage system that allows water to drain off, so it is a big drain which gets smaller until escapes the basin to the mouth of the water were it meets the sea. A Drainage basin can be described as a complex open system because it is a part of the water cycle that is the biggest open system. By this, I mean that a drainage basin is a system that forms part of the water cycle as it has different characteristics, which include inputs, outputs, storage and trough flow. The significance of an open system:

Precipitation is a main form of input, although the amount varies over time and space, this makes up a big part of the input to a system with a certain rule, this rule is with the increase of intensity of a storm the decrease in the duration and the decrease of the space. For the Drainage basin to be an open system it has to include an output, this can be explained by the place where the water is lost which can happen by either the river carrying the water out of the basin or evapotranspiration. Evapotranspiration can be divided in to two separate words, evaporation (physical process) is the first, which can be defined as the loss of water from different surfaces including soil and water to the earth’s atmosphere. The second part is transpiration (biological process) it is the loss of water from vegetation although it is more complex as it includes water loss from the pores of a leaf but this only occurs depending a certain time of the year, the type of the plant, the amount of the vegetation and even the availability of moisture.

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Storage is smaller part of the system; it is where water for a particular reason is held up possibly by a surface or a surrounding. A Lake is a storage place for water surrounded by land. There are also other places, like forests that according to suggestions from Newson  “Estimates suggest that in a woodland area up to 30 percent of the precipitation may be lost through interception, which helps to explain why soil erosion is limited in forests”. This was taken by David Waugh ‘Geography An Integrated Approach’. The reason that storage is important is because it can ...

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