Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID 2023_OR_Good

Advancing Partitioning of Water Budget Components in CONUS404 Applications Through Integration of Stable Water Isotope Tracers with USGS Hydrologic Model Outputs

Institute: Oregon
USGS Grant Number:
Year Established: 2023 Start Date: 2024-01-01 End Date: 2026-12-31
Total Federal Funds: $304,474 Total Non-Federal Funds: $316,989

Principal Investigators: Stephen P. Good

Project Summary: It is important for society to have accurate predictions of how water moves through landscape and into rivers. Water can leave a watershed to the atmosphere through plant water use and evaporation from other surfaces. Water can also leave a watershed via river channels by quick overland flow and slower subsurface flow. Because models that predict these flows are calibrated to the total amount of water returning to the atmosphere or flowing in rivers, the amount of flowing through individual pathways is poorly understood. In this project we will evaluate how existing surface water models perform when we include stable water isotope tracers, because these tracers exhibit distinct signals associated with different pathways. By comparing model-derived estimates of stable isotope tracers with observations of the tracers in rivers we can better estimate the amount of water passing through each distinct pathway and thereby improve predictions of water resources overall.