Abstractions from Precipitation 79

3.13 INTERCEPTION
When it rains over a catchment, not all the precipitation falls directly onto the ground.
Before it reaches the ground, a part of it may be caught by the vegetation and subse-
quently evaporated. The volume of water so caught is called interception. The inter-
cepted precipitation may follow one of the three possible routes:
1. It may be retained by the vegetation as surface storage and returned to the at-
mosphere by evaporation; a process termed interception loss;
2. It can drip off the plant leaves to join the ground surface or the surface flow; this
is known as throughfall; and
3. The rainwater may run along the leaves and branches and down the stem to
reach the ground surface. This part is called stemflow.
Interception loss is solely due to evaporation and does not include transpiration,
throughfall or stemflow.
The amount of water intercepted
in a given area is extremely diffi-
cult to measure. It depends on the
species composition of vegetation,
its density and also on the storm
characteristics. It is estimated that
of the total rainfall in an area dur-
ing a plant-growing season the in-
terception loss is about 10 to 20%.
Interception is satisfied during the
first part of a storm and if an area Fig. 3.7 Typical Interception Loss Curve
experiences a large number of small storms, the annual interception loss due to forests
in such cases will be high, amounting to greater than 25% of the annual precipitation.
Quantitatively, the variation of interception loss with the rainfall magnitude per storm
for small storms is as shown in Fig. 3.7. It is seen that the interception loss is large for
a small rainfall and levels off to a constant value for larger storms. For a given storm,
the interception loss is estimated as
Ii = Si + KiEt (3.18)
where Ii = interception loss in mm, Si = interception storage whose value varies from
0.25 to 1.25 mm depending on the nature of vegetation, Ki = ratio of vegetal surface
area to its projected area, E = evaporation rate in mm/h during the precipitation and t
= duration of rainfall in hours.
It is found that coniferous trees have more interception loss than deciduous ones.
Also, dense grasses have nearly same interception losses as full-grown trees and can
account for nearly 20% of the total rainfall in the season. Agricultural crops in their
growing season also contribute high interception losses. In view of these the interception
process has a very significant impact on the ecology of the area related to silvicultural
aspects, in in situ water harvesting and in the water balance of a region. However, in
hydrological studies dealing with floods interception loss is rarely significant and is
not separately considered. The common practice is to allow a lump sum value as the
initial loss to be deducted from the initial period of the storm.

3.14 DEPRESSION STORAGE

When the precipitation of a storm reaches the ground, it must first fill up all depressions