Measure of three‐dimensional drainage basin form

When investigators have wanted surrogates for basin form in connection with river flow characteristics, they have frequently resorted to measuring aspects of the basin from a map, intuitively reasoning that they afford a suitable description of form. Since this reasoning is not necessarily so, a model is derived that generates the three‐dimensional form of a basin by using six coefficients derived from map analysis. The model reproduces correctly the important characteristics of surface roughness and spatial autocorrelation.