Use of WRF-Hydro over the Northeast of the US to Estimate Water Budget Tendencies in Small Watersheds

Abstract

In the Northeast of the US, climate change will bring a series of impacts on the terrestrial hydrology. Observations indicate that temperature has steadily increased during the last century, including changes in precipitation. This study implements the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF)-Hydro framework with the Noah-Multiparameterization (Noah-MP) model that is currently used in the National Water Model to estimate the tendencies of the different variables that compounded the water budget in the Northeast of the US from 1980 to 2016. We use North American Land Data Assimilation System-2 (NLDAS-2) climate data as forcing, and we calibrated the model using 192 US Geological Survey (USGS) Geospatial Attributes of Gages for Evaluating Streamflow II (Gages II) reference stations. We study the tendencies determining the Kendall-Theil slope of streamflow using the maximum three-day average, seven-day minimum flow, and the monotonic five-day mean times series. For the water budget, we determine the Kendall-Theil slope for changes in monthly values of precipitation, surface and subsurface runoff, evapotranspiration, transpiration, soil moisture, and snow accumulation. The results indicate that the changes in precipitation are not being distributed evenly in the components of the water budget. Precipitation is decreasing during winter and increasing during the summer, with the direct impacts being a decrease in snow accumulation and an increase in evapotranspiration. The soil tends to be drier, which does not translate to a rise in infiltration since the surface runoff aggregated tendencies are positive, and the underground runoff aggregated tendencies are negative. The effects of climate change on streamflows are buffered by larger areas, indicating that more attention needs to be given to small catchments to adapt to climate change.

The Impact of Variable Land‐Atmosphere Coupling on Convective Cloud Populations Observed During the 2016 HI‐SCALE Field Campaign

“…For example, Lin et al () used the WRF‐Hydro framework in which the Noah Multi‐Parameterization is driven by the North American Land Data Assimilation System‐2 (Xia et al, ) analyses to evaluate streamflow and evapotranspiration over Texas during a three‐year period. A similar model configuration was used by Somos‐Valenzuela and Palmer () to examine the water budget in the northeastern United States over a 36‐year period. Nevertheless, the predicted soil quantities could still contain uncertainties that are attributed to assumptions used by the land‐surface parameterizations and the available spatial and temporal resolution of the atmospheric analyses.…”

Daily Patterns of River Herring (Alosa spp.) Spawning Migrations: Environmental Drivers and Variation among Coastal Streams in Massachusetts

“…Our streamflow models were calibrated using observations from neighboring gauged streams and represent the natural hydrological characteristics of our 12 study sites. However, the models do not account for water withdrawals within a season (Somos‐Valenzuela and Palmer 2018), potentially resulting in a disconnect between our estimates of flow and the actual flow in our target systems. Thus, our inconclusive results regarding the effects of streamflow on daily fish migrations may be explained by anthropogenic manipulation of flow.…”

“…The resolution of the WRF‐Hydro model is 1 km, and the terrain routing resolution is 250 m. The model was calibrated using direct flow observations made by the U.S. Geological Survey from neighboring gauged streams (streamflow observations from Geospatial Attributes of Gages for Evaluating Streamflow II; Falcone 2011). See Somos‐Valenzuela and Palmer (2018) for a full description of the flow models used in this study, including model performance and limitations.…”

A Process-Based, Fully Distributed Soil Erosion and Sediment Transport Model for WRF-Hydro

“…Poor representation of meteorological forcing or errors may propagate into the hydrologic simulation and affect the result in a nonlinear way. Similar to previous WRF-Hydro studies [20,21], the NLDAS-2 dataset was used in this study as meteorological forcing. As explained in Section 2.4, in order to better represent the rainfall intensity, NLDAS-2 s rainfall field was substituted with interpolated rain gauge observation.…”

“…Besides, WRF-Hydro takes advantage of various available meteorological and terrain datasets and has been fully coupled with meteorological and climate models such as WRF. WRF-Hydro's performance has been evaluated by its applications in flooding [18], water resource management [19], water budget estimation [20], decadal scale hydroclimatic change [21], and others. Currently, an instance of WRF-Hydro is running operationally as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Water Model, which provides streamflow forecasts on 2.7 million river reaches of the contiguous United States.…”