Coupled Regional Hydroclimate Model and Its Application to the Tigris-Euphrates Basin
This article has a reply.
VIEW THE REPLYPublication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 16, Issue 12
Abstract
To establish a basinwide water management plan for the Tigris-Euphrates (TE) watershed, it is necessary to perform rigorous water balance studies of the whole watershed—at least for critical historical drought and flood conditions and under various water resources development scenarios. Water-balance studies over the watershed require climatic and hydrologic data sets, corresponding to historical critical flood and drought periods, at fine time and spatial grid resolutions provide the necessary hydroclimatic information. The Regional Hydroclimate Model of the Tigris-Euphrates (RegHCM-TE) and the associated geographic information system (GIS) were developed to downscale large-scale atmospheric data sets over the TE watershed and to reconstruct the aforementioned climatic and land hydrologic data sets at fine spatial and time increments. In RegHCM-TE, the earth system over the TE watershed is modeled as a fully coupled system of atmospheric processes aloft coupled with the atmospheric boundary layer, land-surface processes, surface and subsurface hydrologic processes, and the interactions among the various hydrologic and atmospheric processes. The parameters of the model are estimated by using existing global and local GIS data. By using the large-scale global historical atmospheric databases as its initial and boundary conditions, RegHCM-TE has been used to reconstruct historical hydroclimate data at a grid size of 15 km over the TE watershed, for which only very sparse hydrologic observations were available. RegHCM-TE and its model validation are described in this paper.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
References
Anthes, R. A., and Warner, T. T. (1978). “Development of hydrodynamic models suitable for air pollution and other mesometeorological studies.” Mon. Weather Rev., 106, 1045–1078.
Avissar, R., and Verstraete, M. M. (1990). “The representation of continental surface processes in atmospheric models.” Rev. Geophys., 28(1), 35–52.
Brooks, R. H., and Corey, A. T. (1964). “Hydraulic properties of porous media.” Hydrology Paper No. 3, Colorado State Univ., Fort Collins, CO.
Burdine, N. T. (1953). “Relative permeability calculations from pore size distribution data.” Trans. Am. Inst. Min. Eng., 198, 71–7.
Chen, Z. Q., Govindaraju, R. S., and Kavvas, M. L. (1994a). “Spatial averaging of unsaturated flow equations for areally heterogeneous fields: 1. Development of models.” Water Resour. Res., 30(2), 523–533.
Chen, Z. Q., Govindaraju, R. S., and Kavvas, M. L. (1994b). “Spatial averaging of unsaturated flow equations for areally heterogeneous fields: 2. Numerical simulations.” Water Resour. Res., 30(2), 534–544.
Chen, Z. Q. R., Kavvas, M. L., Ohara, N., Anderson, M. L., and Yoon, J. (2011). “Impact of water resources utilization on the hydrology of Mesopotamian marshlands.” J. Hydrol. Eng., 16(12), 1083–1092.
Deardorff, J. W. (1978). “Efficient prediction of ground surface temperature and moisture with inclusions of a layer of vegetation.” J. Geophys. Res., 83(C4), 1889–1903.
Dudhia, J. A. (1993). “A nonhydrostatic version of the Penn State/NCAR mesoscale model: Validation tests and simulation of an Atlantic cyclonic and cold front.” Mon. Weather Rev., 121, 1493.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). (1974). FAO-Unesco Soil map of the World (1∶25;000;000), Rome, Italy.
Gardner, W. R. (1958). “Some steady-state solutions of the unsaturated moisture flow equation with application to evaporation from a water table.” Soil Sci., 85(4), 228–232.
Gray, D. M., and Male, D. H. (1981). Handbook of snow, Pergamon, Canada.
Grell, G. A., Dudhia, J., and Stauffer, D. R. (1995). “A description of the fifth-generation Penn State/NCAR mesoscale model (MM5), NCAR/TN-398+STR.” NCAR Technical Note, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, 117.
Haltiner, G. J., and Williams, R. T. (1980). Numerical prediction and dynamic meteorology, Wiley, New York, 477.
Kavvas, M. L., et al. (1998). “A regional-scale land surface parameterization based on areally-averaged hydrologic conservation equations.” Hydrol. Sci. J., 43(4), 611–631.
Kavvas, M. L., et al. (2004). “Watershed environmental hydrology (WEHY) model based on upscaled conservation equations: Hydrologic module.” J. Hydrol. Eng., 9(6), 450–464.
Kolars, J., and Mitchell, W. (1991). The Euphrates River and the southeast Anatolia development project, Southern Illinois Univ. Press, Carbondale, IL, 324.
Kondo, J., Numata, Y., and Yamazaki, T. (1988). “Parameterization of snow albedo.” J. Jpn. Soc. Snow Ice, 50, 216–224 (in Japanese).
Kondo, J., and Yamazaki, T. (1990). “A prediction model for snowmelt, snow surface temperature and freezing depth using a heat balance methods.” J. Appl. Meteorol., 29, 375–384.
Legates, D. R., and Willmott, C. J. (1990). “Mean seasonal and spatial variability in gauge-corrected, global precipitation.” Int. J. Climatol., 10, 111–127.
McCuen, R. H., Rawls, W. J., and Brakensiek, D. L. (1981). “Statistical analysis of the Brooks-Corey and the Green-Ampt parameters across soil textures.” Water Resour. Res., 17(4), 1005–1013.
Naff, T., and Hanna, G. (2001). “The marshes of southern Iraq: A hydro-engineering and political profile.” The Iraqi marshlands, E. Nicholson and P. Clark, eds., AMAR, London, 169–193.
Noilhan, J., and Planton, S. (1989). “A simple parameterization of land surface processes for meteorological models.” Mon. Weather Rev., 117, 536–549.
Ohara, N., and Kavvas, M. L. (2006). “Field observations and numerical model experiments for the snowmelt process at a field site.” Adv. Water Resour., 29, 194–211.
Ohara, N., Kavvas, M. L., Anderson, M. L., Chen, Z. Q. R., and Yoon, J. (2011). “Water balance study for the Tigris-Euphrates river basin.” J. Hydrol. Eng., 16(12), 1071–1082.
Rawls, W. J., Brakensiek, D. L., and Saxton, K. E. (1982). “Estimation of soil water properties.” Trans. ASAE, 1316–1320, 1328.
Soil Conservation Service. (1975). “Soil taxonomy: A basic system of soil classification for making and interpreting soil surveys.” Handbook 436, USDA, Washington, DC, 754.
Soil Conservation Service. (1999). “State soil geographic data base: Data users guide”. USDA, Washington, DC.
van Genuchten, M. T. (1980). “A closed form equation for predicting hydraulic conductivity in unsaturated soils.” Soil Sci. Soc. Am. J., 44, 892–898.
Wetzel, P. J., and Chang, J. T. (1988). “Evapotranspiration from nonuniform surfaces, a first approach for short-term numerical weather prediction.” Mon. Weather Rev., 116, 600–621.
Willmott, C. J., Rowe, C. M., and Philpot, W. D. (1985). “Small-scale climate maps: A sensitivity analysis of some common assumptions associated with grid-point interpolation and contouring.” Am. Cartograph., 12, 5–16.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 16 • Issue 12 • December 2011
Pages: 1059 - 1070
Copyright
© 2011 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Oct 14, 2009
Accepted: Dec 28, 2010
Published online: Nov 15, 2011
Published in print: Dec 1, 2011
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.