A conceptual, continuous time model called SWAT (Soil and Water Assessment Tool) was developed to assist water resource managers in assessing the impact of management on water supplies and nonpoint source pollution in watersheds and large river basins. The model is currently being utilized in several large area projects by EPA, NOAA, NRCS and others to estimate the off‐site impacts of climate and management on water use, non‐point source loadings, and pesticide contamination. Model development, operation, limitations, and assumptions are discussed and components of the model are described. In Part II, a GIS input/output interface is presented along with model validation on three basins within the Upper Trinity basin in Texas.
An automated base flow separation technique has been developed and tested. Base flow is considered to be the ground‐water contribution to stream flow. Estimates of the amount of base flow can be derived from stream flow records. Such estimates are critical in the assessment of low flow characteristics of streams for use in water supply, water management, and pollution assessment. An automated base flow separation technique using a digital filter has been tested against three other automated techniques and manual separation methods. The filter appears to be comparable to other automated techniques in its ability to reproduce the results produced from graphical separation techiques. The filter technique is easy to use and has the added advantage in that it can be adjusted by the user to take into account personnel preferences in separation of stream flow into surface flow and base flow.
The slope of the base flow recession has been used to estimate the volume of water in storage in the basin above the level of the stream channel, the amount of recharge to the shallow aquifer, and as an input into water budget models. A second automated technique was developed to calculate the slope of the base flow recession curve from stream flow record. This technique is an adaptation of the Master Recession Curve procedure. The results of this method were compared to manual estimates with an efficiency of 74 percent.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.