MODELING FLOOD RESPONSE IN ARID WATERSHEDS: GLEN CANYON TRIBUTARY WATERHOLES, ARIZONA, USA

Quantifying the hydrologic response of arid watersheds is valuable for the future of agriculture, land management, and hazard assessment. Modeling arid and semi-arid watershed hydrology currently presents many challenges, including dynamic infiltration, spatially and temporally distributed storm cells, and vertical slopes. These challenges require novel techniques and remotely sensed data to adequately model arid watersheds. Our research seeks to create a physically based, spatially distributed hydrological model to evaluate watershed hydrology under different land cover and climate scenarios in arid regions. Our flow model, desertHydro, uses R software and CRAN packages including whitebox and terra. The desertHydro package facilitates creating and modifying hydrological simulations with GIS applications. The Waterhole's watershed, located south of the Glen Canyon Dam in northern Arizona, serves as a case study for integrating hydrological and remotely sensed data. The study location has over 20 years of discharge and rain gauge data with more than 70 recorded events. The model is used to test the effects of different rainfall methods, land cover classification, and soil characteristics within the watershed. Preliminary results from the study indicate that spatially distributed rainfall produces the most accurate discharge for the watershed. Utilization of remotely sensed data can improve the understanding of these arid regions and increase the model’s effectiveness in predicting discharge.