Hack's law

Hack's law is an empirical relationship between the length of streams and the area of their basins. If L is the length of the longest stream in a basin, and A is the area of the basin, then Hack's law may be written as

$L\propto A^{h}$

where the exponent h is slightly less than 0.6 in most basins. Note that h varies slightly from region to region, and also slightly decreases for larger basins (>8,000 mi², or 20,720 km²).

Further reading

• Rigon, R., et al, 1996, On Hack's law: Water Resources Research, v. 32, n. 11, pp. 3367-3374.

• Willemin, J.H., 2000, Hack’s law: Sinuosity, convexity, elongation: Water Resources Research, v. 36, n. 11, pp. 3365–3374. Cetegory:Geomorphology