CRWR Online Report 2000-1
Approaches to Continental Scale River Flow Routing
By Kwabena Asante, David R. Maidment, James S. Famiglietti and Francisco
Olivera
ABSTRACT
Recent concerns about global climate change
and a series of large-scale hydrologic events such as the Mid-West flood of 1993
and the El Nino of 1997 have focused attention on the need to track the flow of
water through the entire hydrologic cycle. On the land surface, databases of
routing parameters and routing models are required to describe the movement of
runoff generated by Global Circulation Models (GCMs) and other soil water
balance models over the earth’s surface. In this study, a terrain analysis is
performed using 30 arcsecond Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data to develop a
global database of terrain derived routing parameters. A computationally
efficient grid based routing model, called a source to sink (STS) model, is
implemented in this study. It routes flow directly from the point of generation
to the desired observation point. The STS model also allows for easy interaction
with models of other phases of the hydrologic cycle by incorporating the
boundaries of their modeling units into the definition of its own modeling
units. A continental scale STS model is created and parameterized for each
continent using datasets derived from the terrain analysis. A process is defined
for determining additional velocity and dispersion parameters from observed flow
data. Another continental scale routing model is developed using the watershed
based approach of the Hydrologic Modeling System (HMS). Hydrologic elements and
routing parameters for the HMS model are derived from the same terrain data used
in parameterizing the STS model. Basin responses from the two models are
compared for various spatial and temporal resolutions and parameter
distributions to determine the implications of their respective conceptual
models. These comparisons show that basin responses in the STS model are
relatively independent of spatial and temporal scale while the HMS model is
scale dependent with regard to both spatial and temporal resolution. Basin
responses for a fine resolution HMS models were successfully duplicated in a STS
model for both the uniform and non-uniformly distributed velocity and dispersion
parameter case.
CRWR Online Report 2000-1
Approaches to Continental Scale River Flow Routing
By Kwabena Asante, David R. Maidment, James S. Famiglietti and Francisco
Olivera
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