Development of a Distributed Watershed Model and Its Application to Clear Creek, Iowa

Abstract

A new watershed model, sedimentation and river hydraulics—Watershed (SRH-W), is developed for event-based runoff and soil erosion prediction. The model is physically based and mesh-distributed. The adopted numerical method addresses issues such as terrain representation and efficient execution, in addition to various traditional algorithms. The mesh cells can be rectangles or polygons and may be coarser than the fine-scale features. Fine terrains are taken into account in the water storage and budget computation. The model development is still a work in progress; this paper focuses on the methodologies adopted, along with the model validation, and application related to the runoff. In particular, SRH-W is applied to the Clear Creek Watershed, Iowa, which has monitoring data for model evaluation. Model details, challenges, and calibration are presented and discussed.