Variable: Incremental quickflow

Variable ID: incqkflow

Originator:U.S. Geological Survey
Publication Date:2025
Title:USGS National Water Availability Assessment Data Companion website
Geospatial Data Presentation Form:Digital datasets
Online Linkage:https://water.usgs.gov/nwaa-data/data-file-directory?path=data/water-quantity/wqn-ensemble-conus-nwaa-v1/incqkflow/

Larger Work Citation(s):

Citation Information:

Originator:Martinez, A.J., Padilla, J.A., and Gorski, G.
Publication Date:2025-01-07
Title:Monthly ensemble outputs from the National Hydrologic Model Precipitation-Runoff Modeling System and the Weather Research and Forecasting model hydrologic modeling system for the conterminous United States, Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico for water years 2010–2020
Geospatial Data Presentation Form:Digital datasets
Online Linkage:https://doi.org/10.5066/P1RBMDUT
Publisher:U.S. Geological Survey – ScienceBase

Citation Information:

Originator:Stets, E., Miller, O., Cashman, M., Powlen, K., Martinez, A., Archer, A.A., and Padilla, J.A.
Publication Date:2025-01-11
Title:Local water use and climate drive water stress over the conterminous United States with substantial impacts to fish species of conservation concern
Geospatial Data Presentation Form:Digital datasets
Online Linkage:https://d197for5662m48.cloudfront.net/documents/publicationstatus/240601/preprint_pdf/3e71524f57457d69e1fc51577b205ace.pdf
Publisher:Authorea Preprints

Description:

Name:Incremental quickflow

Variable ID:incqkflow

Units:Millimeters per month (mm/mo)

Summary:

Quickflow is the amount of water coming from overland and shallow subsurface flow. It consists of the part of a streamflow hydrograph separated from baseflow (such that streamflow is equal to the sum of quickflow and baseflow). Incremental quickflow does not include quickflow contributions from upstream, so its contribution is localized to the catchment. Incremental quickflow combined with incremental baseflow constitute local contributions to the channel. When combined with upstream channel inflows, these fluxes determine streamflow in a reach. NHM-PRMS & WRF-Hydro CONUS NWAA v1 Ensemble incremental quickflow values are the mean of those values from two component models: NHM-PRMS CONUS NWAA v1 and WRF-Hydro CONUS NWAA v1. These component model simulations of incremental quickflow are described below. NHM-PRMS CONUS NWAA v1 model incremental quickflow: Incremental quickflow describes the amount of water simulated to leave each modeled hydrologic response unit (HRU) as surface runoff and shallow subsurface runoff, which becomes input for HRUs corresponding stream segment for each day of the simulation. These daily HRU-based values are then temporally aggregated to monthly time steps and spatially transferred to the 12-digit hydrologic units (HUC12s) for the conterminous United States. This variable is calculated with simulated output from the National Hydrologic Model Application of the Precipitation-Runoff Modeling System. WRF-Hydro CONUS NWAA v1 model incremental quickflow: WRF-Hydro's 250-m lateral routing schemes will move surface and shallow subsurface (<2 meter) water across the landscape based on local head gradients. When these flows reach a channel cell, they become channel inflow. The model resolves overland flow into the channel on a 10-second, 250-m scale. Quickflow is accumulated over the month at the catchment scale and then spatially averaged (area-weighted) across catchments within a HUC12.

Technical Description:

The NHM-PRMS & WRF-Hydro CONUS NWAA v1 Ensemble model outputs are an average of results from two component models: NHM-PRMS CONUS NWAA v1 and WRF-Hydro CONUS NWAA v1, described in detail below. Whenever results from both models were available, the mean of the two was taken. When results were only available from one of the two models, the value from the one available model was used. NHM-PRMS CONUS NWAA v1 model technical description: A national application of the USGS Precipitation-Runoff Modeling System (PRMS) (Leavesley et al., 1983; Markstrom et al., 2015) was developed using the USGS NHM infrastructure (Regan et al., 2018; Regan et al., 2019). This particular configuration of the NHM-PRMS applied for the CONUS used the Geospatial Fabric for National Hydrologic Modeling version 1.1 (Bock et al., 2020) for modeling units, the WRF-based atmospheric forcing dataset CONUS404-BA (Zhang et al., 2024), and the final parameter database provided in Markstrom et al. (2024). The PRMS is a process-based, distributed-parameter, daily time step hydrologic simulation code which simulates hydrologic response to various combinations of atmospheric forcings, such as air temperature and precipitation, and landscape characteristics. This application of the PRMS was calibrated using the multi-step process described in Hay et al. (2023). Version 5.2.1 (doi: 10.5066/P9LVUWDC) of the PRMS code was used for this application of the NHM-PRMS. The Geospatial Fabric for National Hydrologic Modeling (GF) version 1.1 was developed by aggregating NHDPlus version 1 catchments and flowlines for the CONUS, and NHDPlus high-resolution catchments and flowlines for those HUC4 spatial units that cross the Canadian border where NHDPlus version 1 did not have acceptable catchment resolution. Atmospheric forcings of air temperature and precipitation from the CONUS404-BA dataset were used for this application of the NHM-PRMS. The hourly time step, 1-kilometer gridded variables of air temperature and precipitation from CONUS404-BA were temporally transformed into daily maximum and minimum air temperature and daily precipitation accumulation, and then spatially mapped to the GF v1.1 modeling units, for use in this NHM-PRMS application. WRF-Hydro CONUS NWAA v1 model technical description: WRF-Hydro is a community-based modeling framework originally designed to facilitate coupling between the WRF atmospheric model and components of terrestrial hydrologic models (Gochis et al., 2020). Vertical water and energy movement is represented by a column land surface model (LSM), which is enhanced by accounting for lateral water movement through overland, shallow subsurface, deeper baseflow, and channel flow routing. The NWAA configuration of WRF-Hydro uses the Noah-multiparameterization (Noah-MP) LSM (Niu et al., 2011) operating on a 1- km grid at hourly resolution. WRF-Hydro physics-based hydrologic routing schemes transport surface water and shallow saturated soil water laterally across a 250-m resolution terrain grid and into river channels. The NWAA leverages WRF-Hydro's conceptual baseflow parameterization, which approximates deeper groundwater storage and release through a simple exponential decay model. The three-parameter Muskingum–Cunge river routing scheme is used to route streamflow on an adapted National Hydrography Dataset Plus (NHDPlus) version-2 (McKay et al., 2012) river network representation (Cosgrove et al., 2024). The WRF-Hydro model was forced by the bias-adjusted CONUS404 dataset (Zhang et al., 2024) and calibrated using streamflow observations. A subset of 17 soil, vegetation, and baseflow parameters were calibrated to streamflow in 1,522 gaged, predominantly natural flow basins. The calibration procedure used the Dynamically Dimensioned Search algorithm (Tolson and Shoemaker, 2007) to optimize parameters to the Kling-Gupta Efficiency (Gupta et al., 2009) of hourly streamflow. Each basin was calibrated independently, and a hydrologic similarity strategy was then used to regionalize parameters to the remaining basins within the model domain (Rafieeinasab et al., 2024). The calibration period included water years 2014-2018 and water years 2011-2013 and 2019-2021 were used for validation. The model simulation period covers water years 2010-2021. Model outputs include 3-hourly, 1-km estimates of canopy interception; snow water equivalent, coverage and height; soil and canopy evaporation; plant transpiration; soil moisture across 4 layers (0.1, 0.3, 0.6, and 1.0 meter thicknesses) ; and recharge. Ponded water and depth to shallow saturation are output at 250-m resolution at 3-hourly resolution. Conceptual groundwater storage, baseflow, and streamflow are provided at NHDPlus V2 catchments and reaches at hourly resolution. These outputs were temporally aggregated to monthly resolution and then spatially aggregated to HUC12 units.

Parent Model:

Name:Hydrologic Model Ensemble (NHM-PRMS & WRF-Hydro, CONUS NWAA v1)
Model ID:wqn-ensemble-conus-nwaa-v1

Time Period of Content:

Time Period Information:

Range of Dates/Times:

Start Year/Month:200910
End Year/Month:202009

Status:

Scenario:Historical

Spatial Domain:

Description of Geographic Extent:Lower 48 United States

Bounding Coordinates:

West Bounding Coordinate:-126.0
East Bounding Coordinate:-66.2
North Bounding Coordinate:49.7
South Bounding Coordinate:24.4

Geospatial Data Needed to Map Output:

Description of Spatial Resolution:12-digit hydrologic unit codes

Citation Information:

Title:October 2020 version of the Watershed Boundary Dataset
Online Linkage:https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/67082a0fd34e969edc5a1cca

Access Constraints:Some files are too large to open in spreadsheet programs. For ideal viewing of these files, please use a text editor to ensure all data are retained.

Entity and Attribute Information:

Detailed Description:

Entity Type:

Entity Type Label:incqkflow_historical_CONUS_200910-202009_describe.txt

Entity Type Definition:

Text (txt) file containing summary information for the dataset. For each metric (huc12_id, year_month, and incqkflow_mm/mo) it provides the total number of dataset observations, the number of distinct values, and various summary statistics.