The Annals of Applied Probability

Hack’s law in a drainage network model: A Brownian web approach

Abstract

Hack [Studies of longitudinal stream profiles in Virginia and Maryland (1957). Report], while studying the drainage system in the Shenandoah valley and the adjacent mountains of Virginia, observed a power law relation $l\sim a^{0.6}$ between the length $l$ of a stream from its source to a divide and the area $a$ of the basin that collects the precipitation contributing to the stream as tributaries. We study the tributary structure of Howard’s drainage network model of headward growth and branching studied by Gangopadhyay, Roy and Sarkar [Ann. Appl. Probab. 14 (2004) 1242–1266]. We show that the exponent of Hack’s law is $2/3$ for Howard’s model. Our study is based on a scaling of the process whereby the limit of the watershed area of a stream is area of a Brownian excursion process. To obtain this, we define a dual of the model and show that under diffusive scaling, both the original network and its dual converge jointly to the standard Brownian web and its dual.

Article information

Source
Ann. Appl. Probab., Volume 26, Number 3 (2016), 1807-1836.

Dates
Revised: July 2015
First available in Project Euclid: 14 June 2016

https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aoap/1465905020

Digital Object Identifier
doi:10.1214/15-AAP1134

Mathematical Reviews number (MathSciNet)
MR3513607

Zentralblatt MATH identifier
1344.60017

Citation

Roy, Rahul; Saha, Kumarjit; Sarkar, Anish. Hack’s law in a drainage network model: A Brownian web approach. Ann. Appl. Probab. 26 (2016), no. 3, 1807--1836. doi:10.1214/15-AAP1134. https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aoap/1465905020

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