..Water
is an essential resource and potential hazard and thus humans have always
sought to understand and manage water...The
first civilizations and densest populations have always developed on
water, especially the banks of rivers: Egyptians (Nile), Romans (Tiber),
Mesopotamia (Tigris and Euphrates), China (Huang Ho and Yangtze), Pakistan
(Indus), India (Ganges)..Concept
of a hydrologic cycle found millennia before present in writings of Greek
philosophers (Aristotle explained the mechanics of precipitation) and of
King Solomon (Ecclesiastes 1:7)..Egyptians
monitored the Nile around 3800 B.P...Rainfall
was measured in India before 2400 B.P. for tax assessment..During
the Renaissance (16th century), Leonardo da Vinci and Bernard Palissy
linked stream flow to precipitation..The
first concrete theories and water balance studies were based onm
experiments in the Seine basin and on the Mediterranean and surrounding
and (Edmund Halley)..First
regular measurements of stream flow: the Rhine at Basel in 1809, the Tiber
at Rome in 1825, the Ohio at Wheeling, W. Virginia in 1838..Current
use of the term hydrology began around 1750..In
the 18th century the major advances were the mathematical basis of fluid
mechanics and hydraulics (Chezy, Bernoulli), the nature of evaporation and
the concept of the global hydrological cycle (Dalton)..In
1856, Darcy laid the foundation of groundwater theory in a water supply
report for Dijon, France..First
textbook: Manual of Hydrology by Nathaniel Beardmore (1851)..In
the 1930's the U.S. government heavily funded studies of irrigation, flood
control and water conservation; in Canada PFRA was created in 1933..Detailed
field experiments and experimental watersheds (e.g. Marmot basin)
became a
common approach to hydrologic research only since the 1960's
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