Watershed Modeling

Models of watersheds, wetlands, and water bodies provide insight into potential processes of interconnection, limiting factors, and areas for research. By incorporating spatial information about watershed morphology, soil, vegetation, reservoir bathymetry, the ecological processes of aquatic systems with their associated terrestrial inputs is given context and perspective. Common modeling software utilized by the modeling group includes the Soil Water Assessment Tool for watershed systems analysis and CE-Qual-W2 for reservoir analysis. The purpose of this research is to assess the sensitivity of reservoirs to water received from upstream catchments. How linked are the sources of potential contaminants such as nutrients and pharmaceuticals to reservoirs? How does scale and hydrometeorology moderate this relationship?