interception: a standalone construct

In hydrology, interception is the portion of precipitation that is caught by vegetation canopy and other surfaces and never reaches the ground, instead evaporating back to the atmosphere; it reduces the water available for infiltration and runoff and is a distinct loss term in the water balance. Horton's 1919 Rainfall interception measured how much rain forests and other cover retain and return to the air, establishing interception loss as a quantifiable component of the hydrologic cycle. The referent is a flux of water held on surfaces before it reaches the soil, obtained as the difference between gross precipitation and the throughfall plus stemflow that get through, and it is unrelated to a message captured by an eavesdropper.[1]

Unit

Depth or volume of precipitation retained by the canopy and evaporated rather than reaching the ground (mm, or fraction of gross rainfall)

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Estimated as gross precipitation minus throughfall and stemflow, often expressed as a percentage of incident rainfall