Mapping Outlets of Iowa Flood Center and National Water Center River Networks for Hydrologic Model Comparison |
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| Authors: | Felipe Quintero Witold F Krajewski |
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| Affiliation: | Iowa Flood Center, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa |
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| Abstract: | River networks based on Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data differ depending on the DEM resolution, accuracy, and algorithms used for network extraction. As spatial scale increases, the differences diminish. This study explores methods that identify the scale where networks obtained by different methods agree within some margin of error. The problem is relevant for comparing hydrologic models built around the two networks. An example is the need to compare streamflow prediction from the Hillslope Link Model (HLM) operated by the Iowa Flood Center (IFC) and the National Water Model (NWM) operated by the National Water Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The HLM uses landscape decomposition into hillslopes and channel links while the NWM uses the NHDPlus dataset as its basic spatial support. While the HLM resolves the scale of the NHDPlus, the outlets of the latter do not necessarily correspond to the nodes of the HLM model. The authors evaluated two methods to map the outlets of NHDPlus to outlets on the IFC network. The methods compare the upstream areas of the channels and their spatial location. Both methods displayed similar performance and identified matches for about 80% of the outlets with a tolerance of 10% in errors in the upstream area. As the aggregation scale increases, the number of matches also increases. At the scale of 100 km2, 90% of the outlets have matches with tolerance of 5%. The authors recommend this scale for comparing the HLM and NWM streamflow predictions. |
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| Keywords: | NHDPlus Iowa Flood Center National Water Model NFIE |
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