Abstract

The Shale Hills Watershed is one of the National Critical Zone Observatory Program sites. With a long history of research, Shale Hills Watershed provides a unique and well-documented watershed to test and analyze different modeling strategies. At present, a real-time hydrologic monitoring network has been completed with a wide array of datasets, including meteorological data, soil moisture, groundwater levels, and stream outflow data. As part of our CZO research the Penn State Integrated Hydrologic Model has been implemented to test the quality of hydraulic properties (soils and underlying shale), the land cover parameterization (NLCD), with respect to the real-time measurements. A 8-day forecast using National Weather Service NDFD (National Digital Forecast Database) is used as model forcing. Model outputs and near real time data from the CZO are compared for stream flow, soil moisture and groundwater levels. An eddy flux tower provides estimates of evapotranspiration for model comparison. Initial results suggest that errors are within acceptable limits for estimating spatial average water budgets and we are in the process of refining the parameters to provide spatially distributed forecasts. The purpose of our real time simulation is to demonstrate how multiple physical processes can constrain the prediction of watershed states and fluxes.

Citation

Yu, X., Duffy, C., Bhatt, G., Shi, Y., Leonard, L.N., Kumar, M. (2010): Real-Time Implementation of the Penn State Integrated Hydrologic Modeling System: The Shale Hills Critical Zone Observatory. AGU Annual Fall Conference Proceedings.

This Paper/Book acknowledges NSF CZO grant support.