Prediction of mean annual runoff is of great interest but still poses a
challenge in ungauged basins. The present work diagnoses the prediction in
mean annual runoff affected by the uncertainty in estimated distribution of
soil water storage capacity. Based on a distribution function, a water
balance model for estimating mean annual runoff is developed, in which the
effects of climate variability and the distribution of soil water storage
capacity are explicitly represented. As such, the two parameters in the
model have explicit physical meanings, and relationships between the
parameters and controlling factors on mean annual runoff are established.
The estimated parameters from the existing data of watershed characteristics
are applied to 35 watersheds. The results showed that the model could
capture 88.2 % of the actual mean annual runoff on average across the
study watersheds, indicating that the proposed new water balance model is
promising for estimating mean annual runoff in ungauged watersheds. The
underestimation of mean annual runoff is mainly caused by the
underestimation of the area percentage of low soil water storage capacity
due to neglecting the effect of land surface and bedrock topography. Higher
spatial variability of soil water storage capacity estimated through the
height above the nearest drainage (HAND) and topographic wetness index (TWI)
indicated that topography plays a crucial role in determining the actual
soil water storage capacity. The performance of mean annual runoff
prediction in ungauged basins can be improved by employing better estimation
of soil water storage capacity including the effects of soil, topography,
and bedrock. It leads to better diagnosis of the data requirement for
predicting mean annual runoff in ungauged basins based on a newly developed
process-based model finally.
Introduction
Hydrologists have a long-standing interest in mean annual water balance
modeling and prediction. The factors controlling mean annual runoff have
been studied in literature. Mean climate has been identified as the first-order control on mean annual runoff and evaporation and it has been
quantified by climate aridity index, which is defined as the ratio between
the mean annual potential evapotranspiration (Ep) and precipitation
(P) (Turc, 1954; Pike, 1964). Other controlling factors include the temporal
variability of climate (Farmer et al., 2003; Troch et al., 2002; Fu and
Wang, 2019), vegetation (Zhang et al., 2001; Donohue et al., 2007; Gentine
et al., 2012; Li et al., 2013), soil (Atkinson et al., 2002; Yokoo et al.,
2008; Li et al., 2014), and topography (Woods, 2003; Abatzoglou and Ficklin,
2017). Mean annual runoff or evaporation has been modeled as a function of
climate aridity index, and the equation is usually called the Budyko equation
(Budyko, 1958). The effects of other factors are represented by, including a
parameter to Budyko equation (Fu, 1981; Yang et al., 2008; Wang and Tang,
2014). Among these factors, climate, including its mean and temporal
variability, and soil water storage capacity including its mean and spatial
variability, are dominant catchment characteristics controlling mean annual
runoff, especially for those catchments dominated by saturation excess
runoff generation (Milly, 1994).
Intra- and inter-annual climate variability introduces non-steady-state
conditions to finer timescale water balances and the non-steady-state effect
could propagate to the mean annual runoff. The effects of seasonal
variations of precipitation and potential evaporation on long-term runoff
have been studied in several studies. Milly (1994) showed that seasonality
tends to increase mean annual runoff through a stochastic soil moisture
model. The seasonality effects have been demonstrated through a top-down
model by Hickel and Zhang (2006) and a classification study by Berghuijs et
al. (2014). Mean annual water balance also receives impacts from climate
variability at the inter-annual and daily timescales. Li (2014) showed that
the inter-annual variability of precipitation and potential evaporation
could increase the mean annual runoff up to 10 % based on a stochastic
soil moisture model. Shao et al. (2012) found that daily precipitation with
a larger variation potentially increases mean annual runoff especially in
the catchments where infiltration excess runoff is prevalent. Yao et al. (2020) quantified the relative contribution of daily, monthly, and
inter-annual climate variabilities to mean annual runoff and showed that the
contribution decreases, on average, from monthly to inter-annual scales and
then daily scale.
Soil water storage capacity is the maximum storage capacity from land
surface to bedrock, which exerts a powerful control on mean annual runoff
(Konapala and Mishra, 2016). A smaller soil water storage capacity creates
favorable conditions for runoff generation, because the precipitation in
excess of the available storage capacity would be lost as runoff directly,
while catchments with a larger soil water storage capacity could hold more
precipitation for evaporation (Sankarasubramanian and Vogel, 2002; Porporato
et al., 2004; Chen et al., 2013). Soil water storage capacity is closely
related to vegetation since the root structure of vegetation could affect
soil water storage capacity significantly. Research has been conducted to
reveal the role of soil water storage capacity through the linkage of
vegetation and model parameter (Yang et al., 2008; Chen and Wang, 2015).
Gerrits (2009) developed equations for transpiration and interception by
considering the root zone and interception storage capacity as two of the
most important catchment characteristics affecting evapotranspiration. In
addition to the magnitude of the average soil water storage capacity, the
spatial variability of soil water storage capacity within a catchment also
influences precipitation partitioning at the event scale and further
influences the cumulative runoff at the mean annual scale (Moore, 1985;
Jothityangkoon et al., 2001; Gao et al., 2016). It has also been suggested
that the spatial variability of soil water storage capacity could suppress
the actual evaporation, because the maximum evaporation in areas with soil
water storage capacity less than Ep will be smaller than Ep;
therefore, the average evaporation over the entire catchment is smaller than
Ep even though the average storage is greater than Ep, resulting in
more runoff generation compared to the situation when the soil water storage
capacity is spatially uniform (Yao et al., 2020).
Therefore, climate variability and soil water storage capacity need to be
explicitly incorporated into the model for predicting mean annual runoff.
The effect of climate variability could be taken into account by driving the
model with daily precipitation and potential evaporation which are usually
available. The spatial distribution of soil water storage capacity could be
modeled by a distribution function, and it is usually modeled by the
generalized Pareto distribution (Moore, 1985; Zhao, 1992). The distribution
function includes two parameters, i.e., the shape parameter and the maximum
storage capacity over the watershed. In ungauged basins, soil water storage
capacity and its spatial variability need to be estimated directly from
available data. Gao et al. (2014) adopted the mass curve technique, which
has been used for designing the storage capacity of reservoir, to estimate
the average water storage capacity of the root zone using precipitation and
potential evaporation data. The shape parameter of the distribution function
has been estimated from soil data (Huang et al., 2003). However, the
estimated parameters from these methods bring much uncertainty in runoff
estimation, and the two parameters of the generalized Pareto distribution
are usually estimated by model calibration using observed streamflow data
(Wood et al., 1992; Alipour and Kibler, 2018, 2019).
The objective of this paper is to develop a nonparametric mean annual water
balance model for predicting mean annual runoff in ungauged basins, which
has not yet been fully understood (Blöschl et al., 2013). The mean
annual water balance model is forced by daily precipitation and potential
evaporation; therefore, the climate variability at different timescales is
represented explicitly in the climate input. The runoff generation is
quantified by a distribution function for describing the spatial
distribution of soil water storage capacity (Wang, 2018). The mean and the
shape parameter of the distribution function need to be estimated from the
available data in ungauged basins. Therefore, the model serves as a
diagnosis tool for evaluating the data requirement for estimating soil water
storage capacity. The mean soil water storage capacity is estimated from
curve number and climate, because soil water storage capacity consists of the
antecedent soil water storage and the potential maximum soil moisture
retention which can be calculated through the Soil Conservation Service (SCS) curve number method. The
estimation of the shape parameter is diagnosed in terms of the data
requirement including soil, land surface topography, and bedrock topography.
Section 2 introduces the new mean annual water balance model and the study
watersheds. Results and discussion are presented in Sect. 3, followed by
Sect. 4 for conclusions.
MethodologyMean annual runoff model
Climate variability is defined as the temporal variations of precipitation
(P) and potential evapotranspiration (Ep), including their
intra-monthly, intra-annual, and inter-annual variations. For example, the
deviations of daily P or Ep from its monthly mean values are defined as
the intra-monthly variations (Yao et al., 2020). As discussed in the
introduction section, the mean annual runoff model takes daily precipitation
and potential evaporation as inputs; therefore, climate variability is
explicitly included in the model. The developed model calculates daily soil
wetting (infiltration) and evaporation by tracking the soil water storage.
Mean annual runoff is estimated by aggregating the daily values. The daily
soil wetting is calculated using the concept of saturation excess runoff
generation by modeling the spatial variability of soil moisture and soil
water storage capacity. To facilitate the parameter estimation of storage
capacity distribution in ungauged basins, the following distribution
function is used for modeling the spatial distribution of storage capacity
(Wang, 2018):
FC=1-1a+C+1-aSbaC+Sb2-2aSbC,
where FC is the cumulative distribution function (CDF),
representing the fraction of the watershed area for which the soil water
storage capacity is equal to or less than C; a is the shape parameter of
the distribution and varies between 0 and 2; and Sb is the average soil
water storage capacity over the watershed (i.e., the mean of the
distribution). As shown in Wang (2018), this distribution function leads to
the SCS curve number (SCS-CN) method when the initial storage is set to
zero. Therefore, there is a linkage between Sb and the “potential
maximum retention after runoff begins” in the SCS-CN method, denoted as
SCN.
Daily soil wetting and runoff generation is computed as a function of daily
precipitation (P), initial storage (S0), a, and Sb. As shown
in Wang (2018), the average soil wetting (W) is computed by
W=P+Sbm+12-2am-P+(m+1)Sb2-2amSb2-2aSbPa,
where m=S02Sb-aS02SbSb-S0. Setting S0=0 and dividing P on both sides of Eq. (2),
a Budyko-type equation, representing WP as a function of
SbP, is obtained (Wang and Tang, 2014), which has been used to
model long-term soil wetting (Tang and Wang, 2017). Therefore, Eq. (2)
can be interpreted as a non-steady-state Budyko equation which accounts for
the effect of water storage. Daily evaporation (Ed) is computed as (Yao
et al., 2020)
Ed=W+S0SbEp+Sb-Ep+Sb2-2aSbEpa.
The first component on the right-hand side of Eq. (3),
W+S0Sb, is the percentage of storage, and the second
component is the evaporation for the condition when the entire watershed is
saturated, i.e., the spatial distribution of soil water storage is the same as
that of storage capacity (Yao et al., 2020). Dividing by W+S0 on both
sides, Eq. (3) represents EdW+S0 as a function of
EpSb, and the function is the same as the Budyko-type equation
derived by Wang and Tang (2014). Mean annual evaporation (E‾) is
computed by aggregating the daily evaporation, and mean annual runoff
(Q‾) is computed as the difference of mean annual precipitation and
evaporation:
4E‾=∑y=1Y∑d=1DyEdY,5Q‾=P-E‾,
where Y is the number of years, and Dy is the number of days in
year y; y and d represent year y and day d,
respectively. Note that the mean annual runoff includes surface runoff and
baseflow, and both are impacted by climate variability (e.g., intra-annual
variability) (Berghuijs et al., 2014; Fan et al., 2007).
This mean annual water balance model applies two non-steady-state Budyko-type
equations at the daily scale: one for daily soil wetting and the other for
daily evaporation. Runoff routing is not necessary since the model is
prepared for long-term water balance analysis. As a result, the mean annual
water balance model includes two parameters, i.e., the shape parameter (a)
and the average soil water storage capacity (Sb). For studies where a
one-parameter Budyko equation is applied to long-term scale directly, the
effects of climate variability (seasonality, inter-annual variability, and
daily storminess) on mean annual water balance are attributed to the single
parameter of the Budyko equation (e.g., Fu, 1981; Zhang et al., 2001). This
creates the challenge to estimate the single parameter in ungauged basins,
whereas the mean annual water balance model used in this paper takes daily
precipitation and potential evaporation as inputs, and the effects of
climate variability are taken into account explicitly. To achieve the goal
of predicting mean annual runoff in ungauged basins, a and Sb need to
be estimated in ungauged basins.
Parameter estimationAverage soil water storage capacity
Under a given soil moisture condition, soil water storage capacity is the
sum of actual water storage and the remaining (or effective) storage
capacity. The effective storage capacity corresponding to the normal
antecedent moisture condition defined in the SCS-CN method, SCN (mm),
is computed as a function of CN (SCS, 1972; Bartlett et al., 2016):
SCN=25.41000/CN-10,
where CN is the composite curve number based on land use and land cover
(LULC) and hydrologic soil group (HSG) for each watershed. The LULC data can
be obtained from the National Land Cover Database (Homer et al., 2015), and
the HSG data can be extracted from the Gridded Soil Survey Geographic
(gSSURGO) database with a spatial resolution of 10 m (USDA, 2014). In HSG, soils
are assigned to one of the four groups (A, B, C, and D) and three dual
classes (A/D, B/D, and C/D) according to the rate of infiltration when the
soils are not protected by vegetation and receive precipitation from
long-duration storms. For the cells characterized by dual classes, the CN
value is calculated as the average of the two CN values corresponding to the
two soil groups.
The average soil water storage capacity (Sb) is the sum of the actual
storage under the normal condition (S‾) and its corresponding
effective storage capacity:
Sb=S‾+SCN.
The physical meaning of Sb is the mean value of the soil water storage
capacity over a watershed which is defined as the maximum storage from land
surface to bedrock in this study rather than the storage capacity from
shallow soils. Since the “normal antecedent moisture” can be interpreted
as the steady-state soil moisture condition, S‾ is the long-term
average storage over the watershed. The values of S‾ for 59 MOPEX
(MOdel Parameter Estimation Experiment) watersheds are estimated based on
the long-term water balance model in Yao et al. (2020), and these watersheds
do not include any watersheds studied in this paper. The long-term water
balance model used in their study has a similar model structure but the two
parameters, i.e., the mean value of the soil water storage capacity and its
shape parameter in the distribution function, were obtained by model
calibration. The ratio between S‾ and Sb is defined as the
long-term storage ratio S‾Sb. It is
found that the values of S‾Sb for all the
watersheds were larger than 0.5. As shown in Fig. 1, S‾Sb has a linear relationship with the climate aridity index:
S‾Sb=-0.46Φ+1.2,
where Φ is the climate aridity index. Substituting
Eqs. (6) and (7) into Eq. (8), one can estimate the average soil
water storage capacity as a function of curve number and climate aridity
index:
Sb=SCN0.46Φ-0.2.
The degree of saturation S‾Sb
under long-term average climate versus climate aridity index Φ.
Shape parameter
The spatial variability of storage capacity is determined by the spatial
distribution of point-scale pore space across the watershed. The volume of
soil pores at the point scale can be determined by soil thickness and porosity
in different soil layers. The porosity (θs) for each layer is
calculated from the soil bulk density:
θsj=1-ρbjρ,
where j denotes the jth soil layer; ρbj is the
bulk density of the jth soil layer; and ρ is the particle density
(2.65 g/cm3). After obtaining the porosity, the point-scale storage
capacity can be calculated as the following equation (Huang et al., 2003):
C=∑1nzj⋅θsj,
where C is the point-scale soil storage capacity; n is the number of soil
layers; and zj and θsj are the thickness and
porosity of the jth soil layer, respectively. In the gSSURGO database,
the soil thickness and bulk density for each layer are available for shallow
soil from the land surface to ∼2 m soil depth.
The total soil thickness at each point is the elevation difference from land
surface to fresh bedrock. However, the bedrock topography is difficult to
obtain especially at the watershed scale. Alternatively, it is assumed that
the spatial distribution of the actual soil water storage capacity is the same
as the spatial distribution of water storage capacity computed from the
gSSURGO database. In order to compare the shape parameter evaluated from the
soil data with its counterparts evaluated from other methods, the
point-scale storage capacity is normalized with the average storage capacity
over the watershed, and Eq. (1) is rewritten as
Fx=1-1a+x+1-aax+12-2ax,
where x is the normalized storage capacity CSb at the point scale; a is the shape parameter describing the spatial
variability of soil water storage capacity. The shape parameter a is then
estimated by fitting the point-scale storage capacity data obtained from
Eq. (11). A nonlinear programming solver using the derivative-free method
(i.e., MATLAB function “fminsearch”) was used to calculate the optimal
shape parameter by minimizing the root mean square error (RMSE). To
demonstrate the sensitivity of mean annual runoff to the value of shape
parameter, Fig. 2 presents mean annual runoff versus shape parameter based
on the mean annual water balance (Yao et al., 2020). It can be found that
mean annual runoff decreases significantly as the shape parameter increases,
especially when shape parameter approaches its upper limit (i.e., 2). The
negative relationship between the mean annual runoff and the shape parameter
can be attributed to the fact that the larger shape parameter indicates that
less watershed area has small values of point-scale storage capacity (Wang,
2018), and more precipitation could be retained underground for evaporation.
The sensitivity of mean annual runoff (Q) to the value of shape
parameter (a).
Study watersheds
The estimations of mean annual runoff in 35 watersheds are diagnosed in this
paper. The number 35 was determined due to the consideration of the data
availability including soil (hydrologic soil group), land cover and land
use, DEM, and the minimum snow effect and human activities (Wang and
Hejazi, 2011), as well as to keep the efforts of gSSURGO data processing to a
reasonable level while still having a sufficient number of samples for the
watersheds. The drainage area of the watersheds varies from 2044 to 9889 km2. Table 1 shows the USGS (United States Geological Survey) gauge number and climate aridity index of
these watersheds. The saturation excess is the dominated runoff generation
in these watersheds. Daily precipitation and streamflow data during 1948–2003 are extracted from the MOPEX dataset (Duan et al., 2006), and the daily
potential evaporation during this period is calculated based on the
Hargreaves method (Hargreaves and Samani, 1985) by using the daily maximum,
minimum, and mean temperature. The average soil water storage capacity and
the shape parameter for these watersheds are estimated from the available
data of climate, LULC, soil, and topography, and the predictions of mean
annual runoff are diagnosed.
The USGS gauge stations, climate aridity index, the estimated
potential maximum retention of curve number method (SCN), and the
average soil water storage capacity (Sb) for the study watersheds.
The potential maximum retention (SCN) is calculated based on the
average CN in each watershed (Table 1). The average CN is computed based on
LULC and hydrologic soil group. For examples, Fig. 3a shows the LULC map
for the Fox River watershed in Wisconsin, and Fig. 3d shows the LULC map
for the Spoon River watershed in Illinois. The dominant land uses are
agriculture (49 %) and forest (33 %) in the Fox River watershed and
agriculture (77 %) and forest (15 %) in the Spoon River watershed. The
hydrologic soil groups are shown in Fig. 3b (Fox River watershed) and
Fig. 3e (Spoon River watershed). Given the same LULC, the hydrologic soil
group D is more favorable for runoff generation compared with group A. The
dominant hydrologic soil groups are group A (31 %) and group B (19 %) in
the Fox River watershed and group C/D (49 %) and group B/D (20 %) in
the Spoon River watershed. The calculated CN for each grid cell is shown in
Fig. 3c (Fox River watershed) and Fig. 3f (Spoon River watershed). The
average CN is 61.0 for the Fox River watershed and 78.1 for the Spoon River
watershed. Since the Spoon River watershed has a higher percentage of
agricultural land and lower soil permeability, its average CN is higher than
that for the Fox River watershed. Correspondingly, the calculated SCN
in the Fox River watershed (162 mm) is higher than that in Spoon River
watershed (71 mm). The values of SCN over the study watersheds vary
from 56 mm (Auglaize River watershed) to 182 mm (Chattahoochee River
watershed) as shown in Table 1.
The spatial distribution of land use and land cover for the Fox River
watershed in Wisconsin (a) and the Spoon River watershed in Illinois (d), the
hydrologic soil groups for Fox River watershed (b) and Spoon River watershed
(e), and the curve numbers for Fox River watershed (c) and Spoon River
watershed (f).
The average soil water storage capacity is estimated based on the computed
SCN and climate aridity index shown in Eq. (8). For examples, the
climate aridity index in the Fox River watershed is 1.12 which is the same
as that in the Spoon River watershed. The estimated Sb is 721 mm in the
Fox River watershed and 314 mm for the Spoon River watershed. As shown in
Table 1, the estimated Sb varies from 177 mm (Chikaskia River
watershed) to 1559 mm (Chattahoochee River watershed) over the study
watersheds. Figure 4a shows the spatial distribution of the estimated
Sb. Watersheds with higher Sb are mostly distributed in the
eastern US, where the aridity index is relatively lower than that in the
other watersheds.
The estimated average soil water storage capacity (Sb) as a
function of SCN and climate aridity index (a) and shape parameter from
soil data (b).
Estimated shape parameter
The shape parameter (a) for the distribution of soil water storage
capacity is estimated based on the soil data in the gSSURGO database. For
examples, the black circles in Fig. 5 show the normalized storage capacity
for the Fox River watershed (Fig. 5a) and the Spoon River watershed
(Fig. 5b) based on the soil data in the gSSURGO database. As shown in
Fig. 5, the normalized CDF for both watersheds shows an S shape. The
estimated shape parameter is 1.996 for the Fox River watershed (RMSE = 0.58) and 1.990 for the Spoon River watershed (RMSE = 1.27) by fitting to
the soil data. A higher value of shape parameter indicates less spatial
variability; therefore, the spatial variability in the Spoon River watershed
is higher than that in the Fox River watershed. The mean value of RMSE for
the 35 study watersheds is 0.06. Figure 4b shows the estimated shape
parameters for the study watersheds, which vary from 1.830 to 1.998.
The estimated shape parameter for the spatial distribution of soil
water storage capacity based on soil data and the calibrated shape parameter
based on mean annual water balance in the Fox River watershed (a) and the
Spoon River watershed (b).
Diagnosing mean annual runoff prediction
The estimated values of Sb and a based on climate, LULC, and soil
data are applied to the mean annual water balance model. The comparison of
simulated and observed mean annual runoff for the study watersheds is shown
in Fig. 6a. The RMSE for estimated mean annual runoff is 80 mm/yr. The
water balance model captures 88.2 % of the mean annual runoff across the
35 study watersheds; therefore, the methods for estimating Sb and a
based on the available data are promising for predicting annual runoff in
ungauged basins.
(a) Observed versus simulated mean annual runoff using shape
parameter based on soil data; (b) Soil data-based versus calibrated shape
parameter; and (c) observed versus simulated mean annual runoff using shape
parameter based on calibration.
The water balance model with the estimated values of Sb and a
underestimates the mean annual runoff in some watersheds, and the relative
underestimation error is 11.8 % on average among all the study watersheds.
The underestimation of mean annual runoff could be due to the biased
estimation of the shape parameter. As described in Sect. 3, the spatial
variability of soil water storage capacity is assumed to be equal with the
spatial variability of the pore space in the shallow soil. The pore space at
the point scale is calculated through the porosity and soil thickness. The
thickness of the shallow soil in the gSSURGO database is quite uniformly
distributed across the watershed, i.e., around 2 m, whereas the actual soil
thickness including the weathered bedrock is the elevation difference
between the land surface and fresh bedrock, and it can be highly heterogeneous
due to the variable land surface and bedrock topography over the watershed.
To diagnose the effect of land surface and bedrock topography on mean annual
water balance, the shape parameter is calibrated using the observed
streamflow. The streamflow data during 1948–2003 are divided into three
periods: (1) the warm-up period (1948–1953), (2) the calibration period
(1954–1973), and (3) the validation period (1974–2003). During the
calibration, the estimated Sb based on CN is used, and a is the only
free parameter to be calibrated. The calibration is conducted by minimizing
the absolute error of the observed and simulated mean annual runoff through
a global optimization method, i.e., the shuffled complex evolution method (Duan
et al., 1992). As shown in Fig. 6b, most of the calibrated a values are smaller
than the estimated a based on soil data only. The performance of predicted
mean annual runoff (during the validation period) is improved with the
calibrated shape parameter (Fig. 6c). The average of absolute error for
the mean annual runoff is 7.1 %.
The overestimation of shape parameter based on the soil porosity data
underestimates the area percentage of low soil water storage capacity
compared with the calibrated one as shown in Fig. 5a for the Fox River
watershed and Fig. 5b for the Spoon River watershed. The slope at the
normalized soil water storage capacity around 1 for the estimated shape
parameter is higher than that for the calibrated one. Therefore, the
calibrated shape parameter indicates a larger spatial variability. The
underestimation of catchment area with low soil water storage capacity could
result from neglecting the effect of land surface and bedrock
topography, which cannot be referred from the soil database (gSSURGO) where
the point-scale soil thickness is around 2 m.
To explore the impact of land surface topography on the spatial distribution
of soil water storage capacity, the soil data (i.e., porosity) are combined
with the height above the nearest drainage (HAND) method proposed by Gao et
al. (2019). HAND is the vertical elevation difference from a point to its
nearest drainage point. The distribution of HAND was used for estimating the
shape parameter of the spatial distribution of storage capacity. Therefore,
the HAND method uses land surface topography data only for estimating the
shape parameter. In our analysis, the porosity of the soil beyond the bottom
layer in the soil database is assigned with the same value as the bottom
layer. For example, if the HAND for a grid cell is 10.0 m and the porosity
and depth of the bottom soil layer in the gSSURGO database is 0.2 and 2.0 m,
respectively, then the porosity for the soil from 2.0 to 10.0 m depth is
assigned with 0.2. Finally, the total volume of pores is calculated for each
grid cell based on the soil porosity obtained from the gSSURGO database and
the HAND value based on land surface topography.
The control of land surface topography on the hydrologic process has also
been widely quantified through the topographic wetness index (TWI) of TOPMODEL
(Beven and Kirkby, 1979). The spatial variability of soil storage capacity
based on the TOPMODEL assumption has been demonstrated as a beneficial
representation of the conceptual model (Sivapalan et al., 1997). Therefore,
the heterogeneity of TWI in a watershed was proposed to be another surrogate
of the heterogeneity of the soil storage capacity in this study, and the
shape parameter estimated by fitting TWI against Eq. (12) through
minimizing the root mean square error (RMSE) for the Maquoketa River in Iowa
was compared with those obtained from other methods.
The dashed blue line in Fig. 7 shows the porosity-HAND-based CDF of
normalized soil water storage capacity for the Maquoketa River in Iowa
(gauge #05418500). The stream initiation threshold used for calculating
HAND is 40 km2, which is 1 % of the maximum flow accumulation
(Maidment, 2002). The threshold affects the value of HAND, but this is beyond
the scope of this paper. The best fit value of a for the porosity-HAND-based CDF is 1.779, which overestimates the spatial variability of storage
capacity compared with the calibrated shape parameter (a=1.905). This is
due to the assumption of the HAND method that the bedrock between a specific
point and its nearest drainage point is horizontal and intercepts with the
channel bed. However, the bedrock topography may have various slopes in a
watershed (Troch et al., 2002). Therefore, the true value of a (indicated
by the calibrated one) potentially falls between the a obtained from soil
data and the a based on soil and HAND. The bedrock topography from
observation or models is needed to accurately estimate the shape parameter.
The dashed dotted red line in Fig. 7 displays the CDF of the normalized soil
storage capacity based on TWI, and the corresponding value of a is 1.967.
The TWI-based a value also presents a larger spatial variability than that
derived from soil data solely, confirming the importance of topography in
determining the heterogeneity of soil water storage capacity. The deviation
of the TWI-based a value from its calibrated counterpart could be due to
the fact that the bedrock topography is not considered in TWI.
The effects of soil, land surface topography, bedrock topography,
and topographic wetness index (TWI) on the shape parameter of the spatial
distribution of soil water storage capacity.
Conclusions
A mean annual water balance model based on the concept of saturation excess
runoff generation is used for diagnosing the potential for nonparametric
modeling of mean annual runoff in ungauged basins. The model takes the
effect of climate variability into account explicitly since it is driven by
daily precipitation and potential evapotranspiration at the daily time step.
The distribution function, which leads to the SCS curve number method, is
used for describing the spatial distribution of soil water storage capacity.
The mean (i.e., average soil water storage capacity) and the shape parameter
(i.e., the spatial variability of soil storage capacity over the watershed)
of the distribution function can be estimated from the available data. Based
on the linkage of the distribution function and the SCS curve number method,
a new method based on the existing observed data of watershed
characteristics is proposed for estimating the average soil water storage
capacity. The average soil water storage capacity (Sb), as one of the
parameters in the model, was estimated as a function of climate aridity
index and curve number which is calculated based on land cover and soil
data.
The developed mean annual water balance was applied to diagnose the
estimation of shape parameter (a) in this study. The shape parameter,
describing the spatial variation of soil water storage capacity, was first
estimated based on the porosity and soil thickness data in the soil database
(gSSURGO). The estimated values of a were tested in 35 watersheds. The
results showed that the model with the estimated values of Sb and a
underestimated the mean annual runoff by 11.8 % on average over all the
study watersheds. The underestimation of runoff is mainly caused by the
underestimation of the spatial heterogeneity of soil thickness over the
watershed. The height above the nearest drainage (HAND) was then calculated
as the total soil thickness for estimating the total volume of the pore
space. The result showed that topography is of great importance for
determining the spatial variability of soil water storage capacity. The
estimated shape parameter from porosity-HAND overestimated the spatial
variability of the storage capacity compared with the calibrated a, which
may result from the assumed bedrock in the HAND method. The topographic
wetness index (TWI)-based shape parameter further indicated the importance
the topography including the land surface topography and bedrock topography.
Future research will investigate alternative methods for better estimating
the spatial variability of soil water storage capacity over watersheds and
quantify the impacts of vegetation and climate variability (e.g.,
distribution of rainy days, the magnitude and the seasonality of climate
variables).
Data availability
The soil and land use and land cover data that support the findings of this
study are openly available at https://websoilsurvey.sc.egov.usda.gov/App/WebSoilSurvey.aspx (Soil Survey Staff, 2021; Natural
Resources Conservation Services, United States Department of Agriculture)
and https://www.mrlc.gov/data?f%5B0%5D=category%3Aland%20cover&f%5B1%5D=region%3Aconus (NLCD, 2021; National Land Cover Database, United States Geological
Survey), respectively.
Daily precipitation, streamflow, and temperature data are available from
1948 to 2003 through the MOPEX website at https://hydrology.nws.noaa.gov/pub/gcip/mopex/US_Data/ (Schaake, 2021).
Author contributions
DW designed the study; contributed to the methods, results,
and discussion; and modified the text. YG quantified the parameters of the
model and prepared the article with contributions from all co-authors.
LY developed the model code, quantified the parameters, performed the
simulations, and prepared the article with contributions from all
co-authors. NBC contributed to the introduction and modified the
text.
Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Acknowledgements
This research was funded in part under award CBET-1804770 from the National
Science Foundation (NSF) and Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT).
Financial support
This research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (grant no. CBET-1804770) and the Florida Department of Transportation (grant no. BDV24TWO97702).
Review statement
This paper was edited by Fuqiang Tian and reviewed by three anonymous referees.
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