A parallelization framework for calibration of hydrological models

Freund, Elham Rouholahnejad; Abbaspour, Karim C.; Vejdani, M.; Srinivasan, Raghavan; Schulin, Rainer; Lehmann, Anthony

doi:10.1016/j.envsoft.2011.12.001

Cited by 151 publications

(67 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…SWAT is often calibrated at the watershed scale, and it is commonly used to assess the hydrologic response of the landscape at the subbasin scale [e.g., Bekele and Nicklow, 2005;Rouholahnejad et al, 2012], so it could be used to prioritize investments in municipal water supply HESs.…”

Section: Land Use Investments For Municipal Water Supplymentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparing two tools for ecosystem service assessments regarding water resources decisions

Dennedy‐Frank

Muenich

Chaubey

et al. 2016

Journal of Environmental Management

104

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We present a comparison of two ecohydrologic models commonly used for planning land management to assess the production of hydrologic ecosystem services: the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) and the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) annual water yield model. We compare these two models at two distinct sites in the US: the Wildcat Creek Watershed in Indiana and the Upper Upatoi Creek Watershed in Georgia. The InVEST and SWAT models provide similar estimates of the spatial distribution of water yield in Wildcat Creek, but very different estimates of the spatial distribution of water yield in Upper Upatoi Creek. The InVEST model may do a poor job estimating the spatial distribution of water yield in the Upper Upatoi Creek W total water yield, which means that storage dynamics which are not modeled by InVEST may be important. We also compare the ability of these two models, as well as one newly developed set of ecosystem service indices, to deliver useful guidance for land management decisions focused on providing hydrologic ecosystem services in three particular decision contexts: environmental flow ecosystem services, ecosystem services for potable water supply, and ecosystem services for rainfed irrigation. We present a simple framework for selecting models or indices to evaluate hydrologic ecosystem services as a way to formalize where models deliver useful guidance. KEYWORDS:ecosystem services, water yield, model comparison, SWAT, InVEST INTRODUCTIONHydrologic ecosystem services (HESs) are beginning to influence land management decisions through both regulations and investments targeted at protecting and improving water resources [Le Maitre et al., 2007;Gordon et al., 2010;Goldman-Benner et al., 2012]. HESs are the goods and services that ecosystems provide to people related to various uses of water, and include water availability for municipal, agricultural, and commercial use, the reduction of the magnitude and frequency of flow peaks to prevent floods, the reduction of sediment and nutrients in water, and the value of natural hydrologic systems for recreation [Brauman et al., 2007; Keeler et al., 2012;Brauman, 2015]. Land managers use HESs to support investments and meet regulatory requirements around water resources in both developing countries [Goldman, 2009] and developed countries [Lautenbach et al., 2010;Logsdon and Chaubey, 2013]. To support investments or meet regulations, scientists and managers assess HESs under expected future conditions based on some model of the landscape and ecosystem response; the landscapes are then managed to restore, retain, or optimize HESs and thus improve the status of the water resources. Scientists and managers assess HES provision in distinct decision contexts-combinations of investment and regulatory goals and institutional structures-which may decide both which models are applied and how model outputs are used to make decisions.

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Section: Land Use Investments For Municipal Water Supplymentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparing two tools for ecosystem service assessments regarding water resources decisions

Dennedy‐Frank

Muenich

Chaubey

et al. 2016

Journal of Environmental Management

104

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…The time required for one single 33-year simulation was about 13 min. Considering 480 simulations in each iteration of calibration, we needed 100 h. In this paper, we used the parallel processing features of SWAT-CUP (a calibration/uncertainty or sensitivity program interface for SWAT) [57], where simulations were distributed over 24 CPUs, decreasing the required time to approximately 4.5 h. After calibration, model outputs including soil water, discharge, and precipitation at subbasin level were used as input variables for drought analysis.…”

Section: Model Set-up and Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Multilevel Drought Hazard Assessment under Climate Change Scenarios in Semi-Arid Regions—A Case Study of the Karkheh River Basin in Iran

Kamali

Kouchi

Yang

et al. 2017

Water

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Studies using Drought Hazard Indices (DHIs) have been performed at various scales, but few studies associated DHIs of different drought types with climate change scenarios. To highlight the regional differences in droughts at meteorological, hydrological, and agricultural levels, we utilized historic and future DHIs derived from the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), Standardized Runoff Index (SRI), and Standardized Soil Water Index (SSWI), respectively. To calculate SPI, SRI, and SSWI, we used a calibrated Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) for the Karkheh River Basin (KRB) in Iran. Five bias-corrected Global Circulation Models (GCMs) under two Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios projected future climate. For each drought type, we aggregated drought severity and occurrence probability rate of each index into a unique DHI. Five historic droughts were identified with different characteristics in each type. Future projections indicated a higher probability of severe and extreme drought intensities for all three types. The duration and frequency of droughts were predicted to decrease in precipitation-based SPI. However, due to the impact of rising temperature, the duration and frequency of SRI and SSWI were predicted to intensify. The DHI maps of KRB illustrated the highest agricultural drought exposures. Our analyses provide a comprehensive way to monitor multilevel droughts complementing the existing approaches.

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“…To overcome this, most projects are run with fewer simulations, resulting in less-than-optimum solutions. To deal with this problem, a parallel processing framework was created in the Windows platform [20] and linked to SUFI-2 in the SWAT-CUP software. In this methodology, calibration of SWAT is parallelized, where the total number of simulations is divided among the available processors.…”

Section: Time Constraintmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Guideline for Successful Calibration and Uncertainty Analysis for Soil and Water Assessment: A Review of Papers from the 2016 International SWAT Conference

Abbaspour

Vaghefi

Srinivasan

2017

Water

375

205

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Application of integrated hydrological models to manage a watershed's water resources are increasingly finding their way into the decision-making processes. The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) is a multi-process model integrating hydrology, ecology, agriculture, and water quality. SWAT is a continuation of nearly 40 years of modeling efforts conducted by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Research Service (ARS). A large number of SWAT-related papers have appeared in ISI journals, building a world-wide consensus around the model's stability and usefulness. The current issue is a collection of the latest research using SWAT as the modeling tool. Most models must undergo calibration/validation and uncertainty analysis. Unfortunately, these sciences are not formal subjects of teaching in most universities and the students are often left to their own resources to calibrate their model. In this paper, we focus on calibration and uncertainty analysis highlighting some serious issues in the calibration of distributed models. A protocol for calibration is also highlighted to guide the users to obtain better modeling results. Finally, a summary of the papers published in this special issue is provided in the Appendix.

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A parallelization framework for calibration of hydrological models

Cited by 151 publications

References 26 publications

Comparing two tools for ecosystem service assessments regarding water resources decisions

Comparing two tools for ecosystem service assessments regarding water resources decisions

Multilevel Drought Hazard Assessment under Climate Change Scenarios in Semi-Arid Regions—A Case Study of the Karkheh River Basin in Iran

A Guideline for Successful Calibration and Uncertainty Analysis for Soil and Water Assessment: A Review of Papers from the 2016 International SWAT Conference

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