• Journal of Korea Spatial Information System Society
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.1-8
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• 2009

In this study the concepts on the elongation, compactness and equivalent ellipse of catchment plan-forms are applied to the real basins considering their theoretical frameworks. The catchment plan-forms and corresponding equivalent ellipses, obtained from GIS, are inspected on downstream directions. As a result the catchment plan-forms seem to be the population of the basin shapes which come from the random interaction between two conjectures on Hack's law being controversial recently. The ratio of the maximum and minimum inertia moments of the catchment plan-form Ri is more sensitive to evaluate the elongation of the basin shapes than the ratio of the main channel length and diameter of circle which has the same area as the catchment plan-form E. The catchment plan-forms compactness measures show distinct aspects according to their different definitions. These results are caused by the difficulties to quantification of the shapes and the composite consideration with more than two compactness measures and the fractal analysis are therefore required to recover them.