Toward capturing hydrologically significant connectivity in spatial patterns

Abstract

Many spatial fields exhibit connectivity features that have an important influence on hydrologic behavior. Examples include high-conductivity preferred flow paths in aquifers and saturated source areas in drainage lines. Connected features can be considered as arbitrarily shaped bands or pathways of connected pixels having similar (e.g., high) values. Connectivity is a property that is not captured by standard geostatistical approaches, which assume that spatial variation occurs in the most random possible way that is consistent with the spatial correlation, nor is it captured by indicator geostatistics. An alternative approach is to use connectivity functions. In this paper we apply connect..