Hydrologic response can be defined as the translation of rainfall into runoff via watershed

routing, storage and loss processes.

 Watershed Routing
Routing is a technique used to predict the changes in shape of a hydrograph as
water moves through a river channel or a reservoir. In flood forecasting, hydrologists
may want to know how a short burst of intense rain in an area upstream of a city will
change as it reaches the city. Routing can be used to determine whether the pulse of rain
reaches the city as a deluge or a trickle.
 Storage
Interception - When it rains over a catchment not all the precipitation falls on the surface
and becomes part of the runoff. Some of the precipitation may caught by the vegetation
before reaching the surface and after that evaporated. The volume of water caught by the
vegetation is called initial loss.

Depression - When the precipitation of a storm or rain reaches the surface of catchment,
it must first fill up all the depressions on the catchment before it can flow over the
surface. The volume of water stored in these depressions is known as depression storage.
 Loss Processes

In engineering hydrology, runoff is the main area of interest. So, evaporation and
transpiration phases are treated as “losses”.
If precipitation not available for surface runoff is considered as “loss”, then the following
processes are also “losses”:

o Interception
o Depression storage
o Infiltration

In terms of groundwater, infiltration process is a “gain”.