Alternative climate data sources for distributed hydrological modelling on a daily time step |
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| Authors: | Ashraf El‐Sadek Max Bleiweiss Manoj Shukla Steve Guldan Alexander Fernald |
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| Institution: | 1. Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences, New Mexico State University, MSC 3Q, P.O. Box 30003, Las Cruces, NM 88003, USA;2. Department of Entomology, Plant Pathology, and Weed Science, New Mexico State University, MSC 3BE, P.O. Box 30003, Las Cruces, NM 88003, USA;3. Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences, Sustainable Agriculture Science Center at Alcalde, P.O. Box 159, 371 County Road 40, Alcalde, NM 87511, USA;4. Department of Animal and Range Sciences, New Mexico State University, MSC 3‐I, Las Cruces, NM 88003, USA |
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| Abstract: | Two major criteria in choosing climate data for use in hydrological modelling are the period of record of the data set and the proximity of the collection platform(s) to the basin under study. Conventional data sets are derived from weather stations; however, in many cases there are no weather stations sufficiently close to a basin to be representative of climate conditions in that basin. In addition, it is often the case either that the period of record for the weather station(s) does not cover the period of the proposed simulation or that there are gaps in the data. Therefore, the objectives of this study are to investigate alternative climate data sources for use in hydrological modelling and to develop a protocol for creating hydrological data sets that are spatially and temporally harmonized. The methods we used for constructing daily, spatially distributed, climatic data sets of precipitation, maximum and minimum temperature, wind speed, solar radiation, potential evapotranspiration, and relative humidity are described. The model used in this study was the Soil and Water Assessment Tool implemented on the Mimbres River Basin located in southwestern New Mexico, USA, for the period 2003–2006. Our hydrological simulations showed that two events in January and February 2005 were missed, while an event in August 2006 was well simulated. We have also investigated the usefulness of several other precipitation data sets and compared the simulation results. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
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| Keywords: | hydrological modelling climate data radar data reanalysis data SWAT arid region |
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