Quantifying the Impacts of Hydroclimate Forcing Products on Uncertainties of Future Water Availability across CONUS
Research Team Members
Objective:
This project aims to close these gaps by quantifying the impacts of hydroclimate forcings on water availability futures through exploring a variety of modeling tools, hydroclimate products and plausible scenarios at a national scale.
Approach:
To close these gaps in quantifying the impacts of hydroclimate forcings on water availability futures through exploring a variety of modeling tools, hydroclimate products and plausible scenarios at a national scale, we will achieve following objectives:
1) Quantifying the water budget in hydrological models - VIC and WRF-hydro across watersheds in CONUS.
2) Characterizing how the uncertainties in hydroclimate forcing propagate to water budget components using VIC and WRF-hydro.
3) Projecting water budget components across watersheds in the CONUS into the future using VIC and WRF-hydro.
Impact:
The outcome of this project includes scientific publications and presentations in professional meetings, and future water availability information along with uncertainties related to hydrological models, hydroclimate forcings and future climate change scenarios.Abstract:
Hydrological models have been used to simulate and predict the water budget, such as the National Water Model and the Hillslope Link Model available from the NextGen framework. In addition, the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) macroscale hydrologic model was developed to quantify the water and energy budgets in the hydrological cycle; VIC has been used to evaluate land surface water balance across the CONUS using reanalysis data. However, the tasks of forecasting future water availability such as streamflow, runoff, and soil water with these models are still challenged by among others various types of hydroclimate forcing (e.g., CONUS404 and AORC), a lack of national soil water content profile information, and uncertainties tied to the forcing data and responses.
Given the available hydroclimate forcing products, this project proposes to quantify the impacts of hydroclimate forcings on water availability futures through exploring a variety of modeling tools, hydroclimate products and plausible scenarios at a national scale.
The products of this project includes scientific publications and presentations in professional meetings, and future water availability information along with uncertainties related to hydrological models, hydroclimate forcings and future climate change scenarios.
Our project has been quantifying the uncertainty of CONUS404 data in simulating the water budget in the Upper Colorado River basin and South Fork of Iowa River Basin. We have mainly used WRF-Hydro/National Water Model and VIC in the two basins. The results and the modeling framework will be extended to other basins.