ON THE COUPLING OF LARGE-SCALE HYDROLOGY MODELS

In recent years, hydrologists have begun to focus on scientific studies of increased complexity and scope. These studies have relied on the development and application of a model, coupling both climate and hydrologic systems. This presentation will address our approaches for designing interactive climate-hydrologic systems to examine explicit responses of rivers, lakes, wetlands and water tables across various scales. Remotely sensed data and GIS data sets were integrated with observed and analyzed measured data to form a base for the hydrologic simulation. One important science issue with a model covering a large area is how hydrologic processes can be scaled to make the simulation problem tractable. Approaches dealing with scale and coupling among different hydrologic components will be illustrated with numerical experiments. The simulated hydrologic components (i.e., major river flows, lake volumes, water-table depths, vadose-zone soil moisture and recharge rates) are reasonable and comparable to observed data. This continuous direction is at the nexus of related fields of geoinformatics, cyberinfastructure in watersheds and remote measurements.