MODELING SURFACE RUNOFF OF SPRING LAKE WATERSHED

A watershed is an area of land where all of the water that collects on it is eventually transported to a common outlet, in this case Spring Lake. The Spring Lake watershed covers a large portion of land surrounding Spring Lake. Creating a model to accurately represent the surface runoff of the Spring Lake watershed from precipitation events would allow us to predict changes in surface runoff due to the development of land. It would also provide reference material for future research projects. The program we are using to model the runoff is HEC-HMS. This is a free program developed by the US Army Corps of Engineers for simulating runoff in hydrologic systems. HEC-HMS contains many models that can be used to increase the accuracy of the simulated hydrographs. Each model must be carefully evaluated to select those that will work the best for a particular watershed. Many of the models require input of data collected from the field. The type of data needed can vary widely, such as: depth of rainfall, soil type, geometric dimensions of streams. So far, we have been able to implement several models on HEC-HMS to create a working hydrograph. This hydrograph has the capability to receive input on precipitation depth over time and display volume of runoff and volume of water that has infiltrated into the soil.