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Leaky Bucket Model

03 Sep 2024 05:30 AM
The Leaky Bucket concept/model has many applications to many disciplines. The concept can be a simple understanding of some process having inputs, outputs, and a fixed capacity buffering the two. This can be applied to the surface water budget as inputs (precipitation), outputs (runoff, evaporation, infiltration) and capacity (soil water holding capacity) can be generalized. The featured chart presents such a model with fixed parameters of a bucket with depth of one inch and a fixed daily loss rate of 0.15 inches. The implication is that any daily rainfall over 1.15 inches (based on the autoplot's implemented algorithm) will overtop the bucket and be "lost". Or this can be considered runoff that is no longer available for soil infiltration. The top panel shows the bucket depth, which increases due to received rainfall and decreases each day by 0.15 inches. Once the bucket is empty, the water level can not go negative. So it is informative to count up the number of days for the season that the bucket was empty. This is generally a proxy to water availability stress. So for the 1 May to 2 Sep period for Ames, the mean average number of such days is 50 and the 2024 total comes in well below that number. The side panel shows the largest and smallest accumulations and the usual suspects are listed, including just one such day found for 1993 and a number of the Dust Bowl era years within the top 10. You can certainly play with this autoplot tool and select your own bucket depth and loss rates.

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Tags:   bucket