Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID 2012ND257B

Toward Understanding the Hydrologic Processes on Topographic Surfaces with Depressions - Development of a Physical-based Distributed Puddle-to-Puddle (P2P) Hydrologic Model

Institute: North Dakota
Year Established: 2012 Start Date: 2012-03-01 End Date: 2013-02-28
Total Federal Funds: $10,000 Total Non-Federal Funds: $20,000

Principal Investigators: Xuefeng Chu

Project Summary: Hydrologic functions and behaviors of depressions in topography are poorly understood due to their spatially and temporally varied hydrologic processes. Flooding is the hydrologic problem of top most concern in North Dakota. Poor understanding of the regional hydrologic processes may result in difficulty in flood prediction. Although depressions play a critical role in hydrological processes, depressions are rarely explicitly incorporated into hydrologic modeling due to the complexity of simulating these hydrological processes. To avoid simulating the complex water movement in depressions, many models rely on removing depressions by smoothing the DEM data to define a fully connected drainage network of a watershed. Most of the widely used models are not capable of simulating all the spatial and temporal dynamics of the individual depressions and their interactions. The goal of this proposed study is to develop a state-of-the-art, physically-based distributed puddle-to-puddle (P2P) hydrologic model capable of simulating the spatially and temporally varied hydrologic processes of depressions and their dynamic interactions. Specific objectives of the study are: 1) to develop the P2P hydrologic model; 2) to test the P2P hydrologic model by conducting lab and field overland flow experiments; 3) to apply the P2P hydrologic model to a real site selected in Red River of North to simulate the related hydrologic processes; and 4) to investigate the related hydrologic topics including the effects of rough surfaces on overland flow generation and hydrologic connectivity.