Continental river routing model for water resources applications

Abstract:

This presentation describes a stand-alone runoff routing tool, mizuRoute, which post-processes runoff outputs from any distributed hydrologic model or land surface model to produce spatially distributed streamflow at various spatial scales from headwater basins to continental-wide river systems. The tool utilizes vector-based river network data, which includes river segment lines and the associated drainage basin polygons. Streamflow estimates at any desired location in the river network can be easily extracted from the output of mizuRoute. The first step of the routing tool is hillslope routing, which uses a gamma distribution to construct a unit-hydrograph that represents the transport of runoff from a hillslope to an outlet of the catchment. The second step is river channel routing, which is performed with one of two routing scheme options: a) the kinematic wave tracking (KWT) routing procedure; and 2) the impulse response function - unit hydrograph (IRF-UH) routing procedure.

This presentation demonstrate mizuRoute’s capabilities to produce spatially distributed streamflow simulations based on the river network data from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) Geospatial Fabric (GF) dataset, which contains over 54000 river segments across the contiguous United States (CONUS). We routed ensemble of 150 years runoff simulated with Variable Infiltration Capacity Model forced by climate data from Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5. A brief analysis of the routing model parameter sensitivity is also presented.