Model: Hydrologic Model Ensemble (NHM-PRMS & WRF-Hydro, CONUS NWAA v1)

Model ID: wqn-ensemble-conus-nwaa-v1

On This Page:

• Identification Information
• Entity and Attribute Information
• Explore Further - Analyses and Findings

Identification Information:

Citation:

Citation Information:

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/

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:Hydrologic Model Ensemble (NHM-PRMS & WRF-Hydro, CONUS NWAA v1)

Model ID:wqn-ensemble-conus-nwaa-v1

Summary:

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 below. NHM-PRMS CONUS NWAA v1 model summary: The NHM-PRMS CONUS NWAA v1 model application refers to the particular configuration of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Hydrologic Model (NHM) that is currently used to simulate various water quantity components used in the USGS National Water Availability Assessment (NWAA). Although many more water quantity components are available from a simulation of the NHM, the components currently used in the NWAA include daily time step outputs of actual evapotranspiration, incremental baseflow, incremental quickflow, snow water equivalent, soil moisture, and soil moisture fraction. These output variables were then aggregated to monthly time step values for the period 1980 to 2021 and remapped from the model application spatial units to the 12-digit hydrologic units (HUC12s). WRF-Hydro CONUS NWAA v1 model summary: The WRF-Hydro CONUS NWAA v1 model simulation provides an estimate of the evolution of terrestrial water budget components in response to weather and climate across the conterminous U.S. (CONUS) at high spatial and temporal resolutions. The WRF-Hydro hydrological model was forced with CONUS404 bias-adjusted meteorological dataset to estimate canopy interception, snowpack dynamics, infiltration, runoff, evapotranspiration, soil drainage, recharge, baseflow, and streamflow.

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.

Variables:

Variable:

Name:Actual evapotranspiration

Variable ID:actet

Variable:

Name:Incremental baseflow

Variable ID:incbsflow

Variable:

Name:Incremental quickflow

Variable ID:incqkflow

Variable:

Name:Snow water equivalent

Variable ID:swe

Variable:

Name:Soil moisture fraction

Variable ID:soilmstfr

Variable:

Name:Incremental runoff

Variable ID:incrunoff

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

Entity and Attribute Information:

Detailed Description:

Entity Type:

Entity Type Label:combined_wqn-ensemble-conus-nwaa-v1_historical_CONUS_200910-202009_long.csv

Entity Type Definition:

Comma Separated Value (CSV) file containing data for each of this model's variables for the 2009-2020 period by 12-digit hydrologic unit code (HUC12), month, and year for the Lower 48 United States. The first row is a header row and the data start on the second row. The first column is the HUC12 identifier (huc12_id) and the second column is the year and month (year_month). All following columns represent a variable, named by the variable ID followed by the units (e.g., actet_mm/mo).

Entity Type Definition Source:Producer defined

Explore Further - Analyses and Findings:

National Water Availability Assessment Report Chapter(s):

Chapter:

Title:Chapter A: Executive Summary

Description:

Chapter A introduces the National Water Availability Assessment and provides important background and definitions for how the report characterizes water availability and its components. This chapter also presents the key findings of Chapters B-F and thus acts as a summary of the entire report. The sidebars presented in Chapter A provide context for the datasets and citations that are used throughout the report.

Online Linkage:https://doi.org/10.3133/pp1894A

Chapter:

Title:Chapter B: National Water Supply

Description:

Chapter B (Gorski and others, 2025) is a national assessment of water supply, which is defined as the quantity of water supplied through climatic inputs. The water supply analysis in this chapter includes precipitation (snow or rain), streamflow, soil moisture, snow water equivalent (snowpack), and groundwater levels. This analysis outlines the annual average input and output of water in the U.S. It also includes an assessment of hydrologic regions of the U.S. that have experienced shortages in water supply components between 2010 and 2020, compared to historical conditions.

Online Linkage:https://doi.org/10.3133/pp1894B

Chapter:

Title:Chapter F: Integrated Water availability

Description:

The National Water Availability Assessment Report culminates with Chapter F (Stets and others, 2025), which is an integrated assessment of water availability. A comprehensive description of water availability requires consideration of multiple aspects, such as the amount and conditions of water (quantity and quality), along with the sensitivity of users to those conditions. This chapter uses information from the assessments of water supply, quality, and use to create a more integrated investigation of water availability across CONUS. This investigation includes the use of an index referred to as the surface water-supply and use index (SUI), which determines the relative stress from potential imbalances between water supply and water use.

Online Linkage:https://doi.org/10.3133/pp1894F