River regime can describe one of two characteristics of a reach of a river:
- The variability in its discharge throughout the course of a year in response to precipitation, temperature, evapotranspiration, and drainage basin characteristics (Beckinsale, 1969)
- A series of characteristic power-law relationships between discharge and width, depth, and slope[1]
The latter is described by the fact that the discharge through a river of an approximate rectangular cross-section must, through conservation of mass, equal
where Q is the volumetric discharge, 
is the mean flow velocity, b is the channel width (breadth) and h is the channel depth.
Because of this relationship, as discharge increases, depth, width, and/or mean velocity must increase as well.
References
- ^ Luna B. Leopold, M. Gordon Wolman, John P. Miller. (1995). Fluvial processes in geomorphology. New York: Dover Publications. ISBN 0-486-68588-8.
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