12th Symposium on Global Change Studies and Climate Variations

5.8

Response of regional hydrology to single- & multi-storm events in Susquehanna River Basin Experiment (SRBEX)

Zhongbo Yu, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV; and E. J. Barron, B. Yarnal, M. N. Lakhtakia, R. A. White, D. Pollard, and D. A. Miller

Understanding of hydrologic responses to various natural and human forcings at a regional scale is very important to weather forecasting, rainfall-runoff prediction, optimization of water resources, pollution control, as well as to global change study. The Hydrologic Model System (HMS) has been linked to a regional climate model (RCM) to simulate various surface and subsurface hydrologic processes such as rainfall-runoff partitioning and soil moisture flow. Our distributed hydrologic modeling fully utilized available remotely sensed and spatial digital data sets (e.g., vegetation, elevation, soil) and various HMS components were calibrated to observed data within the study area (e.g. runoff, moisture, groundwater). The RCM-simulated precipitation was downscaled to an 1-km HMS grid resolution. The HMS was driven by the analyzed and RCM-simulated precipitation for single- and multi-storm events for simulating various hydrologic processes. The results indicate that hydrologic simulations are sensitive to the subgrid-scale spatial variability in precipitation and hydraulic parameters. Simulated hydrologic responses to the analyzed precipitation of single- and multi-storm events compare well with observed ones. Simulated streamflows using RCM-simulated precipitation for single-storm event resemble observed ones at the basin outlet because of the implementation of subgrid-scale spatial variability while multi-storm simulations did not do as well.

Session 5, Surface-Atmosphere Interactions (Parallel with Session 6 & Joint Session 2)
Tuesday, 16 January 2001, 8:00 AM-12:00 PM

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