Representing Watersheds with Physics Based Distributed Hydrologic Models
Abstract
Hydrologic models are useful tools for representing watershed response, helping to understand the dominant hydrologic processes in the watershed, and for estimating system response under different forcing, climatic, or physical conditions in the watershed. Model skill in predicting system response is most often demonstrated by history matching. Useful models for predicting system response under varying conditions must include the dominant processes controlling the system response. While many types of hydrologic models are capable of simulating watershed response, physics- based models are capable of simulating the actual physical conditions and responses within the watershed. There are a variety of physics-based hydrologic models available to the practicing community. Like simpler models, these models vary in formulation and complexity. Many of these models, such as the US Army of Corps of Engineers Gridded Surface Subsurface Hydrologic Analysis (GSSHA) model, allow flexibility in terms of both processes simulated and the formulation used to approximate the process. This flexibility allows the user to build the model according to his or her understanding or conceptualization, of the system, including processes that are thought to be important to system response. This also allows the user to use more rigorous methods of simulating critical processes and less rigorous methods of simulating non-critical processes or when data limitations preclude the use of more rigorous methods. In this presentation we will discuss how physics based models can, and have, been used to describe various hydrologic systems to both represent the physical processes in the system and the system response. Using examples from a variety of applications we will demonstrate and discuss the utility of utilizing a flexible physics-based model design for realizing watershed conceptualizations for hydrologic analysis.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2011
- Bibcode:
- 2011AGUFM.H24G..06D
- Keywords:
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- 1805 HYDROLOGY / Computational hydrology;
- 1847 HYDROLOGY / Modeling;
- 1849 HYDROLOGY / Numerical approximations and analysis