HR: 11:50h
AN: H12E-06    [Abstracts]
TI: Diagnostic Evaluation of the abcd Monthly Water Balance Model for the Conterminous United States
AU: * Martinez Baquero, G F
EM: gfmb@hwr.arizona.edu
AF: Department of Hydrology and Water Resources, The University of Arizona, 1133 E North Campus Drive, Tucson, AZ 85721, United States
AU: Gupta, H V
EM: hoshin.gupta@hwr.arizona.edu
AF: Department of Hydrology and Water Resources, The University of Arizona, 1133 E North Campus Drive, Tucson, AZ 85721, United States
AB: Watershed classification systems should provide sufficient information to select proper conceptual and numerical formulations in the modeling of hydrological processes. This ideal situation is limited by our ability to sample the fluxes and characteristics of the watersheds, and the lack of theoretical frameworks that consider watershed heterogeneities across different locations and scales. This work uses several analytic tools to study relationships between watershed characteristics and dominant hydrologic processes at the monthly level by diagnosing the reasons for different levels of performance of the abcd Monthly Water Balance Model at more than 700 watersheds within the conterminous United States using data from the Hydro-Climatic Data Network (HCDN) dataset. To facilitate analysis of the data, cluster analysis and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) were used to identify groups of watersheds with similar input/output relationship and streamflow patterns. These watershed groups were used to examine the discriminatory power of a number of physical variables, indices and signatures of hydrologic behavior with regard to their dominant processes and the performance of the abcd Model and other benchmark models of reduced complexity. The diagnostic analysis resulted in a description of the problems encountered in modeling the water balance for each watershed group, and suggests a road map for future model and data improvements.
DE: 1846 Model calibration (3333)
DE: 1847 Modeling
DE: 1860 Streamflow
DE: 1876 Water budgets
DE: 1879 Watershed
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting