Crane Creek watershed hydrologic modeling

Jose A. Feliciano Cestero University of South Carolina Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Columbia, SC USA

1. Introduction
A hydrologic study tries to model the processes that occur in a watershed during a certain period of time. In order to perform such study specific physical data from the studied watershed is needed. Some of these parameters are: area of the watershed, slope of the channel, length of the channel, soil properties, etc. In hydrology GIS has been used for watershed delineation, runoff estimation, hydraulic modeling, and floodplain mapping. These applications are enhanced through the use of GIS because hydrology is inherently spatial in nature (Bedinent & Huber, 2002). Geographical Information Systems are a very helpful tool to obtain the required parameters for the description of the watershed in an organized and coherent fashion. The data obtained from this part of the analysis will control the quality of the model output; since the hydrologic model greatly depends on how good is the physical description of the basin.

2. Methodology
For our study we will use ArcSWAT, which is a tool for ArcGIS and merge the analysis of the watershed with SWAT. The Soil and Water Assessment Tool, SWAT, a river basin scale model developed by the United States Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service, USDA-ARS (Neitsch et al., 2005). SWAT is a physically based model that incorporates

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packages for flow estimation, sediment movement, crop process, nutrients movement, water quality, etc. For this study we are only interested in the part of the model that deals with the hydrologic process in the area of study, i.e. rainfall, infiltration, excess runoff, channel routing, etc.

3. Model Inputs
3.1. Study site
Crane Creek is located in the northern part of Richland County, South Carolina; it flows from the southern part of Blythewood to the Broad River in Columbia. Has an approximate area of 17,000 hectares and the main channel is approximately 20 km long with an average slope of 0.003 m/m. The watershed is primarily forest-land (50%) and developed-land (30%). The remaining twenty percent of the watershed is a combination of agricultural land, wetland, open water, and other land use types (Strategic Plan for the Crane Creek Watershed Association, 2010). According to the National Wetland Inventory the wetlands comprise aproximately 8% of the total area of the watershed (Center for the Watershed Protection, 2010). Crane Creek had a stream flow gage that worked until 1974, for this reason our modeling period will be for last two years of measured stream gage, i.e. 1973-1974.

3.2. Climate data

SWAT requires certain climate data, i.e. precipitation, wind speed, temperature, humidity and solar radiation. It can be either daily or monthly data, also SWAT have the capability of simulate all the needed data if such is not available. In our study the precipitation, temperature, humidity and wind speed was measured data and the solar radiation was simulated by SWAT.

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3.3. Streamflow
Streamflow data from the USGS National Water Information System was obtained for the same dates as the climatic data. This data will be used later for calibration of the model.

3.4. Topographic and Land Cover data

A 1/3 arc second resolution DTM from the USGS Seamless database was obtained for our study area. The Land Cover map was from the 1992 National Land Cover Database. There are more recent land cover maps available but we used this one because it will be the most similar to our simulation period conditions (1973-1974).

Fig. 1: Crane Creek Watershed

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3.5. GIS data preparation

3.5.1. Watershed delineation After processing the watershed in ArcGIS the basin is divided into 13 sub-basins, as shown in Fig. 1. The outlet of the modeled watershed was chosen to be at the location of the old USGS stream gage, at the Brickyard Rd. bridge under US-20, instead of the junction of Crane Creek with Broad River. 3.5.2. Hydrologic Response Unit (HRU) A Hydrologic Response Unit is an area of the watershed with the same land use, soil and slope; SWAT models the watershed dividing it into HRUs. To create the HRUs ArcSWAT need soil, land cover and slopes from the watershed. The soil data was loaded from ArcGISs States Soil Geographic Data Base, STATSGO, the Land Cover used is from the 1992 NLCD and the slopes of the watershed were obtained from the previous analysis of the watershed. Fig. 2 to Fig. 4 shown the results of the HRU analysis. A total of 109 HRUs where created

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Fig. 2: STATGO soil distribution in the watershed

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Fig. 3 1992 NLCD for Crane Creek

Fig. 4: Slope distribution

Crane Creek watershed hydrologic modeling 3.5.3. Precipitation, temperature, humidity and wind speed

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The precipitation was obtained from the National Climatic Data Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NCDC-NOAA. Daily average

precipitation from January 1, 1973 to December 31, 1974 from the weather station located in the Columbia Metropolitan Airport was used in our model. Also measurements of

temperature, wind speed and the dew point temperature, to compute the humidity, were obtained for the same station. With this data ArcSWAT builds the necessary directory for SWAT.

4. Results
4.1. Preliminary result
SWAT was run for the period that goes from January 1, 1973 to December 31, 1974. The results from this first run are shown in Fig. 5. From this figure we can see that the modeled is not agreeing with the measured streamflow in the watershed outlet. Taking into consideration this result, a calibration process will be performed using SWATCUP.

4.2. Calibration
For the calibration process SWATCUP2 will be used. SWATCUP2, is a public domain software for calibration of SWAT models (Abbaspour, 2008). It incorporates 4 different packages for model calibration, parameterization, uncertainty analysis, sensitivity analysis and validation; these are: SUFI2 GLUE Parasol

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Calibration, sensitivity analysis and validation using the Sequential Uncertainty Fitting, SUFI2, developed by Abbaspour et al. (1997). SUFI2 was chosen because it requires less SWAT iterations to perform a sensitivity analysis and validation than the other modules. 4.2.1. SUFI2 The Sequential Uncertainty Fitting was developed by Abbaspour et al. (1997). It has the following characteristics: Sequential in nature Bayesian framework Is a fitting procedure The procedure is iterative

The inputs for SUFI2 are, variables to change, a range to vary them and observed data to use as target for the calibration. The algorithm uses a Latin Hyper Cube to randomly select the values of the variables within a user-given interval (Abbaspour, van Genuchten, & Schlppi, A sequential uncertainty domain inverse procedure for estimating subsurface flow and transport parameter, 1997). After the total number of iterations are run, the model runs a script to choose a set of the best fitted values based on the given error function. In our calibration a Nash-Sutcliff was used as the objective function; this function will be used to regress the Latin Hyper Cubed generated parameters to perform the sensitivity analysis of the parameters (Abbaspour, 2008).