Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID 2004IN157B

Characterizing Errors in Distributed Hydrologic Modeling

Institute: Indiana
Year Established: 2004 Start Date: 2004-03-01 End Date: 2005-02-28
Total Federal Funds: $50,000 Total Non-Federal Funds: $100,000

Principal Investigators: Rabi Mohtar

Project Summary: Estimating surface water flow after a storm is critical in our humid region for flood analysis and water quality predictions among numerous other uses. Watershed hydrology is a mix of interacting processes that cuts across cascading and overlapping scales of time and space. Modeling these systems offers a unique tool for understanding and integrating the multi-scale processes when real observations and field monitoring fail due to the prohibitive time and cost required. To fully capture the real hydrologic system, modeling watershed hydrologic processes have survived years of empirical estimates. Although simple to develop and apply and are still in good use, empirical modeling fails to bring the accuracy, precision, and the needed details of the processes and their intermediate output. Physically-based and process oriented modeling has the potential to overcome this shortcoming; however, these more complex tools face numerous challenges. Addressing some of these challenges is the goal of this proposal. This research proposal is intended to establish the relationships among the hydrologic parameters and how they are impacted by the scales of the watershed and to evaluate the sources of errors associated with the numerical solution of overland flow. The result of this work will generate guidelines that will be implemented by hydrologic models to improve their efficiency and accuracy of simulation.