Abstract
Fully distributed hydrologic models are often used to simulate hydrologic states at fine spatio-temporal resolutions. However, simulations based on these models may become computationally expensive, constraining their applications to smaller domains. This study demonstrates that a nested-discretization based modeling strategy can be used to improve the efficiency of distributed hydrologic simulations, especially for applications where fine resolution estimates of hydrologic states are of the focus only within a part of a watershed. To this end, we consider two applications where the goal is to capture the groundwater dynamics within a defined target area. Our results show that at the target locations, a nested simulation is able to competently replicate the estimates of groundwater table as obtained from the fine simulation, while yielding significant computational savings. The results highlight the potential of using nested discretization for a detailed yet computationally efficient estimation of hydrologic states in part of the model domain.
Highlights
Physically-based, fully distributed hydrologic models simulate multiple states and fluxes in space and time[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
Distributed integrated hydrologic models have the advantage of simulating multiple states and fluxes at fine spatio-temporal resolution
This study demonstrates that a nested discretization strategy can potentially alleviate this problem, especially for applications where fine resolution estimates of hydrologic states are desired only within a small part of a watershed
Summary
Physically-based, fully distributed hydrologic models simulate multiple states and fluxes in space and time[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. This study implements a nested-discretization based modeling strategy that can be used for efficient distributed hydrologic model simulations, especially for applications where in addition to streamflow estimates at the watershed outlet fine resolution estimates of hydrologic states are desired only within a small part of the model domain Examples of such problem include validation of groundwater dynamics at isolated well locations, mapping of groundwater distribution within wetlands, and characterization of interactions between a hydrographic feature (e.g. a wetland or a river reach) and its neighboring aquifer. The working hypothesis of the study was that a watershed-wide or globally fine mesh provides a spatially resolved simulation result everywhere in the watershed, a locally refined grid could ensure similar estimates of streamflow at the watershed outlet and hydrologic states within the target region while ensuring significant savings in computation time To evaluate this hypothesis, we considered two test applications. Accuracies and computation time of these four simulations were compared to evaluate the efficacy and efficiency of nested-discretization for simulating local hydrology within a given target area
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