Climate is thought to affect the structure and evolution of drainage basins, but it is not clear how climate impacts the power law scaling between channel length and drainage area. Since climate controls runoff, streamflow, and erosion regimes, we looked for dependency of drainage basin morphometrics on climate within a near-global data set. We show that increasingly arid regions have longer channels and narrower drainage basins, and power law scaling between channel length and basin area (Hack's Law) increases monotonically with aridity. We suggest these results arise due to downstream channel extension by rare large floods that erode channels into previously unchanneled terrain, yielding a morphometric signature in drylands that is preserved over long timescales due to a lack of subsequent topographic smoothing. This new understanding of drainage basin morphometrics on Earth may be used to inform interpretations of past climates on our planet and other solar system bodies.

中文翻译：

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世界流域盆地长度和形状的气候控制


气候被认为会影响流域盆地的结构和演变，但尚不清楚气候如何影响河道长度和流域面积之间的幂律缩放。由于气候控制径流、径流和侵蚀状况，我们在近乎全球的数据集中寻找流域形态计量学对气候的依赖性。我们表明，日益干旱的地区拥有更长的河道和更窄的流域盆地，并且河道长度和流域面积之间的幂律尺度（哈克定律）随着干旱而单调增加。我们认为这些结果是由于罕见的大洪水导致下游河道延伸，这些洪水将河道侵蚀到以前未开垦的地形中，在旱地中产生了形态测量特征，由于缺乏后续的地形平滑，该特征在很长的时间尺度上得以保留。这种对地球上流域盆地形态计量学的新理解可用于为解释我们星球和其他太阳系天体过去的气候提供信息。