Three-Dimensional Digital Soil Mapping of Soil Properties using gSSURGO for Improved Hydrologic Modeling

High resolution soil maps provide a detailed distribution of soil properties which helps in creating hydrologic models with a better subsurface characterization. However, subsurface properties are assumed to be homogenous along the soil column in several hydrologic models as they are based on hydrologic soil group classification. This study builds a three-dimensional (3D) digital soil database of hydrologic soil properties using the 10 m Gridded Soil Survey Geographic (gSSURGO) for the Conterminous United States (CONUS). This database circumvents the need for any GIS preprocessing and allows direct ingestion of soil properties at a high resolution. Hydrologic models are then created for selected watersheds using the regular gSSURGO and the 3D gSSURGO to evaluate the impact on the hydrologic output variables. This presentation will discuss the results from this evaluation and the potential of the 3D gSSURGO database in advancing the simulation of subsurface processes in hydrologic models.