Paper accepted: Estimating the water budget components and their variability in a Pre-Alpine basin with JGrass-NewAGE

Finally our paper, on the water budget component estimation in the case where there are some in-situ observations  and when the area is dominated by snow, is accepted. Due to the complexities of issues involved and the tools needed, it has been two/three years since I started to work on this paper. When I say complexities, it mean that while the main goal is  one (i.e. water budget closure spatially, lets say each HRU), but the specific objectives are too many, i.e.

1. Comparison various interpolators/or if possible improve some of the approaches used in literature, with the objective to identify a method that provides more accurate rainfall fields.

2. When a basin is dominated by snow, you can not afford to ignore the snow process, and hence, how much of the total precipitation falling in the form of snowfall is really its own line of research. So we had to come up with some means to do this, and that was the second objective of the paper. 

3. The estimation of ET is problematic. In literature people uses the potential ET to estimate discharge, but most studies does not show actual ET. Hydrological studies are dominated by the rainfall-runoff exercise, with the aim to optimise discharge modelling to obtain high agreement with observed discharge.  From my experience, particularly gained from working on this paper, obtaining discharge estimation having good agreement with discharge observation does not require reasonable estimation of either potential ET or actual ET. Hence, modelling rainfall-runoff, without proper characterisation of ET, could not be the art of science in hydrology. so, the third objective is to estimate ET, which is consistent with the other water budget components.

4. Storage is probable the most difficult to estimate/model at basin scale, hence, the other specific objective of the paper is to develop a methodology for estimating storage at basin scale. 

It was started as two papers, but later we decided to compress them into one. This mean that we have to cut out many results and issues. All this processes took time. In anyway, if you are interested, please find the accepted manuscript here.  

The small, the large, and the macro hydrological system

The global hydrological cycle is a closed system, meaning that the amount of water is fixed.  No input, no output. It is just the circulation! Every river basin  takes the amount of water it needs for its ecosystem maintenance and return it back to the global hydrological system. For a river system, the input to the  basin is precipitation whereas the outputs are  the amount of water that the basin return it back to the system. These are the discharge ( river flow), and  evapotranspiration driven by the energy balance.  As the system changed from the closed system to the open system as moving to the global cycle to basin water cycle,  the basin scale at which the hydrological cycle is looked at  matters. This mean that the proportion of the components such as the precipitation, discharge, evapotranspiration, storage varies across scale. 

The first procedure in modelling the hydrological system is the geometry at which the cycle is estimated. This geometry is extracted from the digital elevation models. These days, they can be easily available from different sources.    Based on the objective and purpose of the modelling, the spatial scale of the basin  can be ranged from few kilometres to hundreds of kilometres (or continental scale).  The digital watershed modelling (DWM) is the pre requisite for modelling, for instance, we are interested at different scales, and  we have been working in the following:

1. Posina Bain, small scale basin

1. Adige scale, large scale basin 

1. Upper Blue Nile basin, Macro scale 

2. Adige river basin

I will not talk about Posina basin in this post. I will have other post about small basin DWM, and hydrological modelling  space-time variability.  Adige is one of the largest,   the second largest basin in Italy(?).  It provides water resources to all the Bolzano, Trentino and Veneto region. We have interest to  model water resource at this basin, and the first step is  the DWM. It is possible to start from the whole basin, and look it into the detail.  To work on the maximum detail topographic information, following series of steps as described in other post, DEM need to be partitioned into many detail, for instance, here the Adige is divided into about 1200 HRUs.  

Adige basin partion into 1200 HRUs using JGrass Spatial toolbox

However, such large numbers of HRUs could computationally be demanding and difficult for data management,  particularly if we are interested to the hydrological outputs at each HRUs. For this reason, the basin can be separated into major basin, and the simulation can be take care of at each particular basin, and use some routing system to estimate at the furthest outlet of the whole basin.  For instance, Adige basin can be divided into several basin (notice the black divides inside the basin, in to five major  basin), and then hydrological simulation can be carried out at each basin, and some sort of routing mechanism can be applied to route to the outlet. 

Some of these can be: 

The position of Adige-Passirio basin (right)  and the topography partitioning into HRU 

 

            Isarco  basin (relatively small basin) that can be singled out for simulation purpose

                    Rienza basin and its topographic partitioning 

Avisio basin and its partition

Noce basin and its partition

3. Upper Blue Nile basin

What we have to do if we are interested even larger (very larger ) basin than the Adige ??? For instance Upper Blue Nile basin, the Ethiopia part of the Blue Nile?  Let's start from what people already did: 

   

 Lake Tana basin where most hydrological studies in the UBN basin is conducted 

• e.g Alemseged T. Haile, Tom Rientjes, Ambro Gieske, and Mekonnen Gebremichael, 2009: Rainfall Variability over Mountainous and Adjacent Lake Areas: The Case of Lake Tana Basin at the Source of the Blue Nile River. J. Appl. Meteor. Climatol., 48, 1696–1717. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/2009JAMC2092.

Senay, G. B., Asante, K. and Artan, G. (2009), Water balance dynamics in the Nile Basin. Hydrol. Process., 23: 3675–3681. doi: 10.1002/hyp.7364

At this study of water balance at the whole Nile basin, UBN is used as single basin. No space-time variabilities study 

Dile et al, also studied water balance at Lake Tana basin ..... as example for UBN basin study 

 Dile, Yihun Taddele and Raghavan Srinivasan, 2014. Evaluation of CFSR Climate Data for Hydrologic Prediction in Data-Scarce Watersheds: An Application in the Blue Nile River Basin. Journal of the American Water Resources Association  (JAWRA) 1-16. DOI: 10.1111/jawr.12182

Gebrehiwot et al, selected 12 basins a way of looking spatial variabilities in water balance  temporal dynamics  

Gebrehiwot, S., Gardenas, A., Bewket, W., Seibert, J., Ilstedt, U. et al. (2014). The long-term hydrology of East Africa's water tower: statistical change detection in the watersheds of the Abbay Basin.

Similarly for looking space-time varibaility, Tekleab et al  select 18 basin and modelling the water balance at those sub basin. 

Tekleab, S., Uhlenbrook, S., Mohamed, Y., Savenije, H. H. G., Temesgen, M., and Wenninger, J.: Water balance modeling of Upper Blue Nile catchments using a top-down approach, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 15, 2179-2193, doi:10.5194/hess-15-2179-2011, 2011.

"  .......a conceptual process-based hydrological model is developed .....to study the runoff mechanisms and rainfall–runoff processes..."

Dessie, M., Verhoest, N. E. C., Pauwels, V. R. N., Admasu, T., Poesen, J., Adgo, E., Deckers, J., and Nyssen, J.: Analyzing runoff processes through conceptual hydrological modeling in the Upper Blue Nile Basin, Ethiopia, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 18, 5149-5167, doi:10.5194/hess-18-5149-2014, 2014.

  

ANIL MISHRA & TAKESHI HATA (2006) A grid-based runoff generation and flow routing model for the Upper Blue Nile basin, Hydrological Sciences Journal, 51:2, 191-206, DOI: 10.1623/hysj.51.2.191

This study is grid-based distributed analysis, however, the focus is on runoff production, where evapotranspiration and other component are not explicitly considered.

 Kim and Jagath made interesting set-up to  model the UBN using 6 sub-basin! However, space-time  modelling of UBN using 6 is not something to envisaged ...... 

Kim, Ungtae and Jagath J. Kaluarachchi, 2009. Climate Change Impacts on Water Resources in the Upper Blue Nile River Basin, Ethiopia. Journal of the American Water Resources Association  (JAWRA) 45(6):1361-1378. DOI: 10.1111 ⁄  j.1752-1688.2009.00369.x

Obviously, further space-time hydrological budget characterisation is necessary in UBN basin. In contrast to the maximum subbasin of 6  partition used to study the whole UBN basin, we need to decide some level of partition that really capture the true variability of the rainfall, evapotranspiration, runoff and storage function. 10 ? 20 ? 50 ? 100? 200? 500?  For the moment, lets try with 300 HRUs. 

Upper Blue Nile basin discretisation into 300 HRUs

To be continued........