Customer Reviews

Elements of Physical Hydrology

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This is a sort of elementary textbook, and should help biologists, chemists, environmentalists, and geologists to obtain fundamentals of hydraulics and hydrology. I am a professional hydrologist, but still enjoyed reading that book. The main value is in proper selection of the subjects, and exceptionally clear explanation. Reading other books, many a times I had a feeling that the author had not fully understood the subject. The authors of Elements of Physical Hydrology have a great talent to make any subject simple, and they know what they are talking about. Excellent book!

This book is perfect for the determinist hydrology. Some applications are joined to this book in a CD.
Good luck for the water scientists.

You'll need adequate background in calculus and maybe a bit of physics to get anything from the book, but overall it is a very good introductory text for people coming to physical hydrology from another hard science or engineering discipline. Like most other professions, hydrology is very jargon-y, and the book does a decent job of matching words to concepts. The glossary in the back helps with that as well.

I was very impressed with with section on floods. This chapter serves as an example of the overall strength of the text. It goes over the various types of hydrographs, gives plenty of definitions, shows illustrations and examples, and also goes over in minor detail, the physics involved in flooding.

The book comes with a CD with problem sets as well as the full text. In general the problem sets are helpful.