Abstract

The groundwater recharge was assessed by using both SWAT and HELP models in Bocheong-cheon watershed. The SWAT model is a comprehensive surface and subsurface model, but it lacks the physical basis for simulating a soil water percolation process. The HELP model which has a drawback in simulating subsurface lateral flow and groundwater flow component can simulate soil water percolation process by considering the unsaturated flow effect of soil layers. The SWAT model has been successfully applied for estimating groundwater recharge in a number of watersheds in Korea, while the application of HELP model has been very limited. The subsurface lateral flow parameter was proposed in order to consider the subsurface lateral flow effect in HELP model and the groundwater recharge was simulated by the modified exponential decay weighting function in HELP model. The simulation results indicate that the recharge of HELP model significantly depends on the values of lateral flow parameter. The recharge errors between SWAT and HELP are the smallest when the lateral flow parameter is about 0.6 and the recharge rates between two models are shown to be reasonably comparable for daily, monthly, and yearly time scales. The HELP model is useful for estimating groundwater recharge at watershed scale because the model structure and input parameters of HELP model are simpler than that of SWAT model. The accuracy of assessing the groundwater recharge might be improved by the concurrent application of SWAT model and HELP model.

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