Theme 4-6-Some hydrological characteristics of the Australian arid zone

Abstract

Analysis of Data collected over a 30 year period from a 400 km2 arid zone research station in Australia show that the rainfall in this arid zone tends to be spatially uniform. Very few convective storms occur. The prevailing storm types reported for most other arid zones are typically of a convective nature. Correlations between rainfall at stations up to 25 km appart are much higher than any others reported for arid zones. Transmission losses were also investigated and it was shown that they were closely related to the volume of void spaces in the stream alluvium. This suggests that to arid zone transmission losses data on the alluvium characteristics of the stream beds will need to be obtained.