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Twenty years after the pioneering attempts to popularise the use of models in physical geography, it is helpful to review the progress that has been made and to consider the ever-widening scope and value of the technique. A model is considered here as any abstraction of reality. Davis’s geographical cycle provides an obvious example of a model which has been highly influential, though not itself quantitative in content or in the insights it has provided. Even if a model is quantitative in its content, the insights from it may be essentially qualitative, and vice-versa. Nevertheless, many of the models used by physical geographers are expressed in quantitative terms and may be used to give numerical forecasts, and we are mainly concerned with such quantitative models here. They are usually expressed in mathematical or logical terms and often implemented through computer simulations. On this view of models, they may lie at any point on a continuum which stretches from newly formed and untested hypotheses to established physical theories or laws at the other.
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