Implications of climate-driven variability and trends for the hydrologic assessment of the Reynolds Creek Experimental Watershed, Idaho

Abstract

This is an author-produced, peer-reviewed version of this article. © 2009, Elsevier. Licensed under the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). The final, definitive version of this document can be found online at Journal of Hydrology, doi: 10.1016Hydrology, doi: 10. /j.jhydrol.2010 NOTICE: This is the author's version of a work accepted for publication by Elsevier. Changes resulting from the publishing process, including peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting and other quality control mechanisms, may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. The definitive version has been published in Journal of Hydrology, Volume 385, Issue 1-4, 2010, DOI: 10.1016/j.jhydrol.2010.020. Implications of Climate-Driven Variability and Trends for the Hydrologic Assessment of the Reynolds Creek Experimental Watershed, IdahoVenkataramana Sridhar Boise State University Anurag Nayak Sutron Corporation AbstractThe Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model was used to assess the implications of long-term climate trends for the hydroclimatology of the Reynolds Creek Experimental Watershed (RCEW) in the Owyhee Mountains, Idaho of the Intermountain West over a 40-year period . Calibration and validation of the macroscale hydrology model in this highly monitored watershed is key to address the watershed processes that are vulnerable to both natural climate variability and climate change and . The model was calibrated using the streamflow data collected between 1997 and 2006 from the three nested weirs, the Reynolds Mountain East (RME) , Tollgate and Outlet. For assessing the performance of the calibrated model, this study used 30 years of streamflow data for the period between 1966 and 1996. This investigation suggested that the model predicted streamflow was best at RME, and inadequate at Outlet. Simulated soil moisture was also verified using the data available from five soil moisture measurement sites. The model was able to capture the seasonal patterns of changes in soil water storage considering the differences in the spatial extent of the observed and predicted soil water storage (point measurements against the spatially averaged values for the HRU) and uncertainty associated with the soil moisture measurements due to instrument effects. Water budget partitioning during a wet (1984) water year and a dry (1987) water year were also analyzed to characterize the differences in hydrologic cycles during the extreme hydrologic conditions. Our analysis showed that in the dry water year , vegetation at the higher elevation were under water stress by the end of the water year. Contrastingly, in the wet water year only the vegetation at low and mid elevations were under water stress whereas vegetation at the at the higher elevations derived substantial soil moisture for ET processes even towards the end of the growing season. To understand the effect of climate...

Can Payments for Ecosystem Services Contribute to Adaptation to Climate Change? Insights from a Watershed in Kenya

“…SWAT allows modeling of climate, and impacts of land and water management on water, sediment, and agricultural chemical yields (Arnold and Fohrer 2005) in agricultural watersheds. It has been widely used to study effects of climate variability and change on watersheds in various parts of the world (e.g., Boorman 2003, Xu et al 2009, Sridhar and Nayak 2010, Bae et al 2011, Liu et al 2011. To evaluate the perceived need for adaptation and identify adaptation options for the ecosystem service buyer, results from a vulnerability assessment of NCWSC to climate change conducted by the World Bank were drawn upon (Danilenko et al 2010) and complemented with an interview with the dam coordinator at Sasumua dam.…”

Evaluation of the Complementary Relationship Using Noah Land Surface Model and North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR) Data to Estimate Evapotranspiration in Semiarid Ecosystems

“…Upscaling of ET estimates from field scale to regional scale by preserving heterogeneity has been quite successful over the past decade (Kavvas et al 1998;Sridhar et al 2003). In water balance studies, ET is often computed as the difference between precipitation and runoff at the basin scale or limited by soil moisture functions for smaller-scale applications (Walter et al 2004;Sridhar and Nayak 2010;Shukla et al 2011). Energy balance-based land surface models (LSMs) and satellite-based models (Allen et al 2007a,b;Alfieri et al 2009;Tang et al 2009;Tang et al 2010) are also widely used to estimate ET.…”

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“…Figure 6 illustrates a comparison of the center of timing (CT) between historical and future trends in streamflows based on all ensembles of climate model outputs that came from A1B, A2 and B1 emission scenarios, covered in the earlier sections. Numerous studies have shown the need for assessing the CT in the western U.S. river basins (Barnett et al 2005;Sridhar and Nayak 2010), which suggests the timing of streamflow when 50% of annual flows would have occurred in a given water year (Oct-Sep) by a certain day of year (DOY). This also corresponds to the peak of the hydrograph.…”

“…Many river basins in the Pacific Northwest including the Salmon River Basin (SRB), is experiencing hydrologic changes over the past several decades, possibly due to climate change and climate variability (Barnett et al 2005;Hamlet et al 2007;Hoekema and Sridhar 2011;Matter et al 2010;Sridhar and Nayak 2010;Cuo et al, 2011). Changes in temperature and precipitation regimes over the Pacific Northwest , as predicted by the climate models, suggest that a general warming conditions in the future and a range of precipitation scenarios (Mote and Salathe 2010;Abatzoglu, 2011).…”