Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID WY_2023_60_Nippgen

Improving Hydrologic Predictions in Wyoming's Headwaters Through Detailed Quantification of Snowmelt

Institute: Wyoming
Year Established: 2023 Start Date: 2021-07-01 End Date: 2024-06-30
Total Federal Funds: $15,000 Total Non-Federal Funds: $21,198

Principal Investigators: Fabian Nippgen

Project Summary: Areas that source most of their water from surface waters are especially vulnerable to fluctuations in water supply from the mountainous regions. Predicting streamflow from snow is crucial for allocating water resources and meeting compact obligations but has proven challenging due to the high degree of spatial and temporal variability of snow accumulation and melt. We will use WRF-Hydro, a community-driven and developed, spatially distributed, physics-based land surface hydrological model with built-in coupling capability to atmospheric models, to simulate the surface and subsurface hydrology of the Snowy Range watersheds. The atmospheric inputs are NASA NLDAS datasets that are precipitation-corrected with multiple snow timeseries in the Snowy Range and compared to point observations from manual surveys, snow depths from UAV surveys, and snow extent from satellite imagery. Further, through the modeling effort, we will quantify potential surface water losses to deeper groundwater layers via fault lines. Our proposed research aims at improving current methods to monitor and predict water resources and runoff generated from snowmelt in Wyoming’s mountain ranges and can inform water resources management at the local and regional level.