Textbooks in common throughout the world are usually northern hemisphere publications and these fail to treat adequately certain hydrologic characteristics of significance elsewehre, particularly variability. This book is a study in comparative hydrology; the first to be made at a global scale using time sequences of data for individual catchments.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Exposes little-known, hard ecological realities that should be heard,
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This review is from: Global Runoff: Continental Comparisons of Annual Flows and Peak Discharges (Paperback)
As a past environmental studies student in Australia, I have gradually become well aware of the unique ecological fragility of Australia and the adaptations that result.
Even today nobody except scientific experts is at all aware of just how different Australia is from Europe or Asia or North America or New Zealand. I likewise understand that for a very long time even scientists were utterly unaware of how fundamentally different Australia (and to some extent sub-Zambezian Africa) actually is from other present-day continents. Tom McMahon, long before the far more famous Tim Flannery, exposed the uniqueness of Australia's environment with his studies of river flows. Runoff variability in Australia and sub-Zambezian Africa for the same level of runoff is more than twice as high as in other continents - and for the same climate type over three times as great. Storages in Australia and sub-Zambezian Africa must be between five and ten times as large as in Europe for the same degree of river regulation. These differences are not due to higher precipitation variability, but because the exceedingly old soils cause native vegetation to have much denser rooting systems that absorb more water and preclude runoff except when moisture is unusually abundant. Whilst the information the book gives is vital for those interested in environmental protection, there is a lack of concrete recommendations. Suggestions on managing the fragile, marginal farmland of Australia and sub-Zambezian Africa (the farming of which harms farmers on much better land in many other countries), on suitable proportions of protected land (which certainly must be much greater than the standard 5 percent) or on whether their unusual runoff variability is actually geologically unusual (which Flannery likewise dares not discuss) should have been part of the book but are not even though it is less than 200 pages long. Despite these limitations, reading "Global Runoff: Continental Comparisons of Annual Flows and Peak Discharges" is firmly recommended. Hopefully it will banish the myth of the "lucky country" that pervade popular assumptions of Australia and show the harsh realities behind the illusion.
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