An understanding of hydrology is important for many civil engineering, environmental engineering, and geotechnical related projects.  A good starting point is a review of the hydrological cycle, watershed characteristics, precipitation, and the rainfall/runoff process. These topics introduce the review of hydrology and preparation for studying more advanced areas of hydrology.

The course study file consists of the material in chapters 1 & 2 from 'Highway Design Series No. 2, Second Edition put out by U.S DOT in October 2002, which is in the pdf file, "Hydrology Review Series 1:Introduction/Precipitation."

This course is intended for hydrologists, civil engineers, hydraulic engineers, highway engineers, geotechnical engineers, and environmental engineers. A learner of this course will gain knowledge about the hydrological cycle, introductory hydrology topics and precipitation.

Upon successful completion of this course, the learner will:

• Be familiar with the processes by which water is transported and converted from one form to another in the hydrological cycle.
• Be familiar with watershed characteristics and they way that they affect runoff from the watershed in response to precipitation.
• Be able to determine the probability of occurrence in a single year for a storm of given return period and vice versa.
• Be able to obtain values for the Manning roughness coefficient for overland flow and sheet flow for various specified ground covers.
• Be able to obtain values for the intercept coefficient for use in the velocity vs slope equation for specified type of flow and ground cover.
• Be able to estimate velocity for overland flow using the velocity slope equation.
• Be able to estimate velocity for pipe and channel flow using the Manning equation.
• Be able to calculate time of concentration by the velocity method.