A Dissipative Hydrological Model and its Application in the Hotan Oasis

2013 ◽  
Vol 392 ◽  
pp. 971-977
Author(s):  
Ling Mei Huang ◽  
Bing Shen

Hydrological model is an essential tool that has played an important role to manage water resources. In the arid oasis plain, there is almost no runoff from the rainfall event. Water supply mainly depends on the surface runoff generated from the rainfall, snow and glaciers melting in the mountainous region. The oasis is a place where runoff components gradually disappear through evaporation, transpiration. Due to human activities, water transformation occurs frequently among surface runoff, soil water, and groundwater. Based on the oasis water cycle and monthly water balance, a dissipative hydrological model was developed to simulate the quantitative relationship among atmospheric water, surface water, soil water and groundwater. The data set collected in the Hotan Oasis was applied to calibrate the model parameters and validate the model. The results showed that the model structure is reasonable and it can be used to compute the volumes of water consumption in the oasis. By quantitatively calculating the components of water balance, we can kwon where and how much water goes and responding measures of water resources regulation would be made to facilitate the effective and efficient utilization of water resources.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camila García-Echeverri ◽  
Nicolás Duque-Gardeazabal ◽  
Carolina Vega-Viviescas ◽  
Pedro Arboleda-Obando ◽  
David Zamora

<p>Evapotranspiration (ET) is one of the most important factors for the water budget and physical processes in the tropical region. This variable affects the atmospheric water and it is important for its capacity to control precipitation, including its influence on absorption and reflection of solar and terrestrial radiation. In the tropical context ET is a relevant process, where the condensation of large amounts of water vapor leads to the release of latent heat energy. In order to understand ecohydrological and climatic synergies and interactions in the tropical basins, different models have tried to represent the hydrological processes in time and space. But most of these models depend on variables that should be measured in situ and are rarely available or limited in the tropical countries. This inevitably requires the model to be simple enough and the parameters can be estimated from climate and basin characteristics. In this regard, Zhang et al. (2008) developed a hydrological model Dynamic Water Balance (DWB). DWB is a semi-distributed model supported in the Budyko framework, which uses partition curves to distribute water to a number of components based on water availability and demand concepts. In general, the model assumes the control over the water balance is mostly dominated by the precipitation (P) and potential evapotranspiration. </p><p>The hydrologic structure of DWB consists of two tanks, soil moisture store and groundwater store, and adjust its mathematical relations through the optimization of four parameters. Due to its simplicity and strong concepts, DWB had been implemented successfully in several types of basins around the globe (Rodriguez et al., 2019).</p><p>This work presents DWBmodelUN, a hydrological R-package with the implementation of DWB in a regular mesh at a monthly time step. DWBmodelUN contains 12 functions related to data entry pre-processing, mathematical development of DWB, calibration algorithm Dynamical Dimension Search and an interactive graphical  module. In overall terms, DWBmodelUN requires: (i) basin geographic data (defines the spatial resolution of the modelling), (ii) hydro-meteorological entry data (P, Temperatute, Streamflow) in raster format, (iii) initial values for the model parameters and (iv) setup data such as warm up, calibration and validation periods. </p><p>In addition, this package includes a practical example of application in Sogamoso River Basin, located at the Oriental mountain range of Colombia.  Therefore, data sets with hydrological, meteorological and setup information were incorporated within the package.</p><p>This tool intents to spread  the DWB model and facilitate its implementation in more basins. In this context, to execute DWBmodelUN users do not need extensive programming skills and the R-package was thought for easily adaptability.</p><p><strong>References</strong></p><p>Rodríguez, E., Sánchez, I., Duque, N., Arboleda, P., Vega, C., Zamora, D., … Burke, S. (2019). Combined Use of Local and Global Hydro Meteorological Data with Hydrological Models for Water Resources Management in the Magdalena - Cauca Macro Basin – Colombia. Water Resources Management. </p><p>Zhang, L., Potter, N., Hickel, K., Zhang, Y., & Shao, Q. (2008). Water balance modeling over variable time scales based on the Budyko framework – Model development and testing. Journal of Hydrology, 360(1–4), 117–131. </p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (7) ◽  
pp. 2411-2428
Author(s):  
Robin K. Weatherl ◽  
Maria J. Henao Salgado ◽  
Maximilian Ramgraber ◽  
Christian Moeck ◽  
Mario Schirmer

AbstractLand-use changes often have significant impact on the water cycle, including changing groundwater/surface-water interactions, modifying groundwater recharge zones, and increasing risk of contamination. Surface runoff in particular is significantly impacted by land cover. As surface runoff can act as a carrier for contaminants found at the surface, it is important to characterize runoff dynamics in anthropogenic environments. In this study, the relationship between surface runoff and groundwater recharge in urban areas is explored using a top-down water balance approach. Two empirical models were used to estimate runoff: (1) an updated, advanced method based on curve number, followed by (2) bivariate hydrograph separation. Modifications were added to each method in an attempt to better capture continuous soil-moisture processes and explicitly account for runoff from impervious surfaces. Differences between the resulting runoff estimates shed light on the complexity of the rainfall–runoff relationship, and highlight the importance of understanding soil-moisture dynamics and their control on hydro(geo)logical responses. These results were then used as input in a water balance to calculate groundwater recharge. Two approaches were used to assess the accuracy of these groundwater balance estimates: (1) comparison to calculations of groundwater recharge using the calibrated conceptual HBV Light model, and (2) comparison to groundwater recharge estimates from physically similar catchments in Switzerland that are found in the literature. In all cases, recharge is estimated at approximately 40–45% of annual precipitation. These conditions were found to closely echo those results from Swiss catchments of similar characteristics.


2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 4265-4306 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Verbist ◽  
W. M. Cornelis ◽  
D. Gabriels ◽  
K. Alaerts ◽  
G. Soto

Abstract. In arid and semi-arid zones runoff harvesting techniques are often applied to increase the water retention and infiltration on steep slopes. Additionally, they act as an erosion control measure to reduce land degradation hazards. Nevertheless, few efforts were observed to quantify the water harvesting processes of these techniques and to evaluate their efficiency. In this study a combination of detailed field measurements and modelling with the HYDRUS-2D software package was used to visualize the effect of an infiltration trench on the soil water content of a bare slope in Northern Chile. Rainfall simulations were combined with high spatial and temporal resolution water content monitoring in order to construct a useful dataset for inverse modelling purposes. Initial estimates of model parameters were provided by detailed infiltration and soil water retention measurements. Four different measurement techniques were used to determine the saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ksat) independently. Tension infiltrometer measurements proved a good estimator of the Ksat value and a proxy for those measured under simulated rainfall, whereas the pressure and constant head well infiltrometer measurements showed larger variability. Six different parameter optimization functions were tested as a combination of soil-water content, water retention and cumulative infiltration data. Infiltration data alone proved insufficient to obtain high model accuracy, due to large scatter on the data set, and water content data were needed to obtain optimized effective parameter sets with small confidence intervals. Correlation between observed soil water content and simulated values was as high as R2=0.93 for ten selected observation points used in the model calibration phase, with overall correlation for the 22 observation points equal to 0.85. Model results indicate that the infiltration trench has a significant effect on soil water storage, especially at the base of the trench.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 15375-15408 ◽  
Author(s):  
O. Munyaneza ◽  
A. Mukubwa ◽  
S. Maskey ◽  
J. Wenninger ◽  
S. Uhlenbrook

Abstract. In the last couple of years, different hydrological research projects were undertaken in the Migina catchment (243.2 km2), a tributary of the Kagera river in Southern Rwanda. These projects were aimed to understand hydrological processes of the catchment using analytical and experimental approaches and to build a pilot case whose experience can be extended to other catchments in Rwanda. In the present study, we developed a hydrological model of the catchment, which can be used to inform water resources planning and decision making. The semi-distributed hydrological model HEC-HMS (version 3.5) was used with its soil moisture accounting, unit hydrograph, liner reservoir (for base flow) and Muskingum-Cunge (river routing) methods. We used rainfall data from 12 stations and streamflow data from 5 stations, which were collected as part of this study over a period of two years (May 2009 and June 2011). The catchment was divided into five sub-catchments each represented by one of the five observed streamflow gauges. The model parameters were calibrated separately for each sub-catchment using the observed streamflow data. Calibration results obtained were found acceptable at four stations with a Nash–Sutcliffe Model Efficiency of 0.65 on daily runoff at the catchment outlet. Due to the lack of sufficient and reliable data for longer periods, a model validation (split sample test) was not undertaken. However, we used results from tracer based hydrograph separation from a previous study to compare our model results in terms of the runoff components. It was shown that the model performed well in simulating the total flow volume, peak flow and timing as well as the portion of direct runoff and base flow. We observed considerable disparities in the parameters (e.g. groundwater storage) and runoff components across the five sub-catchments, that provided insights into the different hydrological processes at sub-catchment scale. We conclude that such disparities justify the need to consider catchment subdivisions, if such parameters and components of the water cycle are to form the base for decision making in water resources planning in the Migina catchment.


Water ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (24) ◽  
pp. 3636
Author(s):  
Adeline Umugwaneza ◽  
Xi Chen ◽  
Tie Liu ◽  
Zhengyang Li ◽  
Solange Uwamahoro ◽  
...  

Droughts and floods are common in tropical regions, including Rwanda, and are likely to be aggravated by climate change. Consequently, assessing the effects of climate change on hydrological systems has become critical. The goal of this study is to analyze the impact of climate change on the water balance in the Nyabugogo catchment by downscaling 10 global climate models (GCMs) from CMIP6 using the inverse distance weighting (IDW) method. To apply climate change signals under the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) (low and high emission) scenarios, the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model was used. For the baseline scenario, the period 1950–2014 was employed, whereas the periods 2020–2050 and 2050–2100 were used for future scenario analysis. The streamflow was projected to decrease by 7.2 and 3.49% under SSP126 in the 2020–2050 and 2050–2100 periods, respectively; under SSP585, it showed a 3.26% increase in 2020–2050 and a 4.53% decrease in 2050–2100. The average annual surface runoff was projected to decrease by 11.66 (4.40)% under SSP126 in the 2020–2050 (2050–2100) period, while an increase of 3.25% in 2020–2050 and a decline of 5.42% in 2050–2100 were expected under SSP585. Climate change is expected to have an impact on the components of the hydrological cycle (such as streamflow and surface runoff). This situation may, therefore, lead to an increase in water stress, calling for the integrated management of available water resources in order to match the increasing water demand in the study area. This study’s findings could be useful for the establishment of adaptation plans to climate change, managing water resources, and water engineering.


Hydrology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 43
Author(s):  
Mouhamed Idrissou ◽  
Bernd Diekkrüger ◽  
Bernhard Tischbein ◽  
Boubacar Ibrahim ◽  
Yacouba Yira ◽  
...  

This study investigates the robustness of the physically-based hydrological model WaSiM (water balance and flow simulation model) for simulating hydrological processes in two data sparse small-scale inland valley catchments (Bankandi-Loffing and Mebar) in Burkina Faso. An intensive instrumentation with two weather stations, three rain recorders, 43 piezometers, and one soil moisture station was part of the general effort to reduce the scarcity of hydrological data in West Africa. The data allowed us to successfully parameterize, calibrate (2014–2015), and validate (2016) WaSiM for the Bankandi-Loffing catchment. Good model performance concerning discharge in the calibration period (R2 = 0.91, NSE = 0.88, and KGE = 0.82) and validation period (R2 = 0.82, NSE = 0.77, and KGE = 0.57) was obtained. The soil moisture (R2 = 0.7, NSE = 0.7, and KGE = 0.8) and the groundwater table (R2 = 0.3, NSE = 0.2, and KGE = 0.5) were well simulated, although not explicitly calibrated. The spatial transposability of the model parameters from the Bankandi-Loffing model was investigated by applying the best parameter-set to the Mebar catchment without any recalibration. This resulted in good model performance in 2014–2015 (R2 = 0.93, NSE = 0.92, and KGE = 0.84) and in 2016 (R2 = 0.65, NSE = 0.64, and KGE = 0.59). This suggests that the parameter-set achieved in this study can be useful for modeling ungauged inland valley catchments in the region. The water balance shows that evaporation is more important than transpiration (76% and 24%, respectively, of evapotranspiration losses) and the surface flow is very sensitive to the observed high interannual variability of rainfall. Interflow dominates the uplands, but base flow is the major component of stream flow in inland valleys. This study provides useful information for the better management of soil and scarce water resources for smallholder farming in the area.


2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (12) ◽  
pp. 6473-6491 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco Pellicer-Martínez ◽  
José Miguel Martínez-Paz

Abstract. Currently, climate change is a major concern around the world, especially because of the uncertainty associated with its possible consequences for society. Among them, fluvial alterations can be highlighted in basins whose flows depend on groundwater discharges and snowmelt. This is the case of the headwaters of the Tagus River basin, whose water resources, besides being essential for water uses within this basin, are susceptible to being transferred to the Segura River basin (both basins are in the Iberian Peninsula). This work studies the possible effects that the latest climate change scenarios may have on this transfer, one of the most important ones in southern Europe. In the first place, the possible alterations of the water cycle of the donor basin were estimated. To do this, a hydrological model was calibrated. Then, with this model, three climatic scenarios were simulated, one without climate change and two projections under climate change (Representative Concentration Pathways 4.5 (RCP 4.5) and 8.5 (RCP 8.5)). The results of these three hydrological modelling scenarios were used to determine the possible flows that could be transferred from the Tagus River basin to the Segura River basin, by simulating the water resource exploitation system of the Tagus headwaters. The calibrated hydrological model predicts, for the simulated climate change scenarios, important reductions in the snowfalls and snow covers, the recharge of aquifers, and the available water resources. So, the headwaters of the Tagus River basin would lose part of its natural capacity for regulation. These changes in the water cycle for the climate change scenarios used would imply a reduction of around 70 %–79 % in the possible flows that could be transferred to the Segura basin, with respect to a scenario without climate change. The loss of water resources for the Segura River basin would mean, if no alternative measures were taken, an economic loss of EUR 380–425 million per year, due principally to decreased agricultural production.


2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 369-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Gómez-Delgado ◽  
O. Roupsard ◽  
G. le Maire ◽  
S. Taugourdeau ◽  
A. Pérez ◽  
...  

Abstract. The profitability of hydropower in Costa Rica is affected by soil erosion and sedimentation in dam reservoirs, which are in turn influenced by land use, infiltration and aquifer interactions with surface water. In order to foster the provision and payment for Hydrological Environmental Services (HES), a quantitative assessment of the impact of specific land uses on the functioning of drainage-basins is required. The present paper aims to study the water balance partitioning in a volcanic coffee agroforestry micro-basin (1 km2, steep slopes) in Costa Rica, as a first step towards evaluating sediment or contaminant loads. The main hydrological processes were monitored during one year, using flume, eddy-covariance flux tower, soil water profiles and piezometers. A new Hydro-SVAT lumped model is proposed, that balances SVAT (Soil Vegetation Atmosphere Transfer) and basin-reservoir routines. The purpose of such a coupling was to achieve a trade-off between the expected performance of ecophysiological and hydrological models, which are often employed separately and at different spatial scales, either the plot or the basin. The calibration of the model to perform streamflow yielded a Nash-Sutcliffe (NS) coefficient equal to 0.89 for the year 2009, while the validation of the water balance partitioning was consistent with the independent measurements of actual evapotranspiration (R2 = 0.79, energy balance closed independently), soil water content (R2 = 0.35) and water table level (R2 = 0.84). Eight months of data from 2010 were used to validate modelled streamflow, resulting in a NS = 0.75. An uncertainty analysis showed that the streamflow modelling was precise for nearly every time step, while a sensitivity analysis revealed which parameters mostly affected model precision, depending on the season. It was observed that 64% of the incident rainfall R flowed out of the basin as streamflow and 25% as evapotranspiration, while the remaining 11% is probably explained by deep percolation, measurement errors and/or inter-annual changes in soil and aquifer water stocks. The model indicated an interception loss equal to 4% of R, a surface runoff of 4% and an infiltration component of 92%. The modelled streamflow was constituted by 87% of baseflow originating from the aquifer, 7% of subsurface non-saturated runoff and 6% of surface runoff. Given the low surface runoff observed under the current physical conditions (andisol) and management practices (no tillage, planted trees, bare soil kept by weeding), this agroforestry system on a volcanic soil demonstrated potential to provide valuable HES, such as a reduced superficial displacement-capacity for fertilizers, pesticides and sediments, as well as a streamflow regulation function provided by the highly efficient mechanisms of aquifer recharge and discharge. The proposed combination of experimentation and modelling across ecophysiological and hydrological approaches proved to be useful to account for the behaviour of a given basin, so that it can be applied to compare HES provision for different regions or management alternatives.


Water ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 896 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amir Haghverdi ◽  
Hasan Sabri Öztürk ◽  
Wolfgang Durner

A high-resolution soil water retention data set (81 repacked soil samples with 7729 observations) measured by the HYPROP system was used to develop and evaluate the performance of regression parametric pedotransfer functions (PTFs). A total of sixteen soil hydraulic models were evaluated including five unimodal water retention expressions of Brooks and Corey (BC model), Fredlund and Xing (FX model), Kosugi (K model), van Genuchten with four free parameters (VG model) and van Genuchten with five free parameters (VGm model). In addition, eleven bimodal, Peters–Durner–Iden (PDI) and bimodal-PDI variants of the original expressions were studied. Six modeling scenarios (S1 to S6) were examined with different combinations of the following input predictors: soil texture (percentages of sand, silt and clay), soil bulk density, organic matter content, percent of stable aggregates and saturated water content (θs). Although a majority of the model parameters showed low correlations with basic soil properties, most of the parametric PTFs provided reasonable water content estimations. The VGm parametric PTF with an RMSE of 0.034 cm3 cm−3 was the best PTF when all input predictors were considered. When averaged across modeling scenarios, the PDI variant of the K model with an RMSE of 0.045 cm3 cm−3 showed the highest performance. The best performance of all models occurred at S6 when θs was considered as an additional input predictor. The second-best performance for 11 out of the 16 models belonged to S1 with soil textural components as the only inputs. Our results do not recommend the development of parametric PTFs using bimodal variants because of their poor performance, which is attributed to their high number of free parameters.


2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (9) ◽  
pp. 3873-3894 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Orlowski ◽  
Philipp Kraft ◽  
Jakob Pferdmenges ◽  
Lutz Breuer

Abstract. A dual stable water isotope (δ2H and δ18O) study was conducted in the developed (managed) landscape of the Schwingbach catchment (Germany). The 2-year weekly to biweekly measurements of precipitation, stream, and groundwater isotopes revealed that surface and groundwater are isotopically disconnected from the annual precipitation cycle but showed bidirectional interactions between each other. Apparently, snowmelt played a fundamental role for groundwater recharge explaining the observed differences to precipitation δ values. A spatially distributed snapshot sampling of soil water isotopes at two soil depths at 52 sampling points across different land uses (arable land, forest, and grassland) revealed that topsoil isotopic signatures were similar to the precipitation input signal. Preferential water flow paths occurred under forested soils, explaining the isotopic similarities between top- and subsoil isotopic signatures. Due to human-impacted agricultural land use (tilling and compression) of arable and grassland soils, water delivery to the deeper soil layers was reduced, resulting in significant different isotopic signatures. However, the land use influence became less pronounced with depth and soil water approached groundwater δ values. Seasonally tracing stable water isotopes through soil profiles showed that the influence of new percolating soil water decreased with depth as no remarkable seasonality in soil isotopic signatures was obvious at depths > 0.9 m and constant values were observed through space and time. Since classic isotope evaluation methods such as transfer-function-based mean transit time calculations did not provide a good fit between the observed and calculated data, we established a hydrological model to estimate spatially distributed groundwater ages and flow directions within the Vollnkirchener Bach subcatchment. Our model revealed that complex age dynamics exist within the subcatchment and that much of the runoff must has been stored for much longer than event water (average water age is 16 years). Tracing stable water isotopes through the water cycle in combination with our hydrological model was valuable for determining interactions between different water cycle components and unravelling age dynamics within the study area. This knowledge can further improve catchment-specific process understanding of developed, human-impacted landscapes.


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