Hydrologic-response simulations for the North Fork of Caspar Creek: second-growth, clear-cut, new-growth, and cumulative watershed effect scenarios

Abstract

This study demonstrates that comprehensive hydrologic-response simulation can be a useful tool for studying cumulative watershed effects. The simulations reported here were conducted with the Integrated Hydrology Model (InHM). The location of the 473 ha study site is the North Fork of the Caspar Creek Experimental Watershed, near Fort Bragg, California. Existing information from a long-term monitoring programme and new soil-hydraulic property measurements made for this study were used to parameterize InHM. Long-term continuous wet-season simulations were conducted for the North Fork catchments and main stem for second-growth, clear-cut and new-growth scenarios. The simulation results show that the increases and decreases, respectively, for throughfall and potential evapotranspiration related to clear-cutting had quantifiable impacts on the simulated hydrologic response at both the catchment and watershed scales. Model performance was best for the new-growth simulation scenarios. To improve upon the simulations reported here would require additional soil-hydraulic property information from across the study area. Although principally focused on the integrated hydrologic response, the effort reported here demonstrates the potential for characterizing distributed responses with physics-based simulation. The search for a comprehensive understanding of hydrologic response will require both data-intensive discovery and concept-development simulation, from both integrated and distributed perspectives. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.