Global soil, landuse, evapotranspiration, historical and future weather databases for SWAT Applications

K C Abbaspour,S Ashraf Vaghefi,R Srinivasan,H Yang

doi:10.1038/s41597-019-0282-4

Abstract

Large-scale distributed watershed models are data-intensive, and preparing them consumes most of the research resources. We prepared high-resolution global databases of soil, landuse, actual evapotranspiration (AET), and historical and future weather databases that could serve as standard inputs in Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) models. The data include two global soil maps and their associated databases calculated with a large number of pedotransfer functions, two landuse maps and their correspondence with SWAT’s database, historical and future daily temperature and precipitation data from five IPCC models with four scenarios; and finally, global monthly AET data. Weather data are 0.5° global grids text-formatted for direct use in SWAT models. The AET data is formatted for use in SWAT-CUP (SWAT Calibration Uncertainty Procedures) for calibration of SWAT models. The use of these global databases for SWAT models can speed up the model building by 75–80% and are extremely valuable in areas with limited or no physical data. Furthermore, they can facilitate the comparison of model results in different parts of the world.

Highlights

Background and SummarySoil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT)[1] is a comprehensive hydrological model for watershed simulation
SWAT models are used in a variety of applications, including quantification of water resources availability[3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10], the impact of climate and landuse changes[11,12,13,14,15,16], soil erosion[17,18,19], water quality[4,20,21,22,23,24,25], and ecosystem services[26,27,28]
We have previously shown that the choice of different routines and objective functions lead to different parameters while producing acceptable calibration results[36,37]

Summary

Introduction

Background and SummarySoil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT)[1] is a comprehensive hydrological model for watershed simulation. We have put together global soil, landuse, and historical and future weather databases for use in SWAT and other similar watershed models (Table 1) as described . We have used pedotransfer functions developed from soils around the world to create the needed parameters such as hydraulic conductivity, available water capacity, and bulk density.

Results

Conclusion