This paper examines the potential of scatterometer data from ERS satellites for improving hydrological simulations in both gauged and ungauged catchments. We compare the soil moisture dynamics simulated by a semidistributed hydrologic model in 320 Austrian catchments with the soil moisture dynamics inferred from the satellite data. The most apparent differences occur in the Alpine areas. Assimi...

Evaluation of flow and transport processes in a watershed-scale requires that the watershed be divided into homogenous spatial units referred to as hydrologically similar units (HSUs). Although a few discretization schemes are already in use, a universally acceptable method of obtaining HSUs is yet to emerge. In this study, we developed a fuzzy inference system (FIS) to classify the saturated h...

Predicting the impact of land cover and climate change on hydrologic responses using modeling tools are essential in understanding the movement and pattern of hydrologic processes within the watershed. The paper provided potential implications of land conversions and climate change scenarios on the hydrologic processes of Muleta watershed using soil and water assessment tool model. Model inputs...

biological soil crusts (bscs) result from an intimate association between soil particles and cyanobacteria, algae, fungi, lichens and mosses in different proportions which live on the surface, or immediately in the uppermost millimeters of soil. therefore bscs cover the ground surface as a coherent layer, and influence primary processes such as carbon and nitrogen fixation and hydrologic status...

Spatial accuracy of hydrologic modeling inputs influences the output from hydrologic models. A pertinent question is to know the optimal level of soil sampling or how many soil samples are needed for model input, in order to improve model predictions. In this study, measured soil properties were clustered into five different configurations as inputs to the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) ...

The presence of ice in soil dramatically alters soil hydrologic and thermal properties. Despite this important role, many recent studies show that explicitly including the hydrologic effects of soil ice in land surface models degrades the simulation of runoff in cold regions. This paper addresses this dilemma by employing the Community Land Model version 2.0 (CLM2.0) developed at the National C...

Soil moisture is an important factor in the global hydrologic cycle, but existing reconstructions of historic soil moisture are limited. We used tree-ring chronologies to reconstruct annual soil moisture in the Upper Colorado River Basin (UCRB). Gridded soil moisture data were spatially regionalized using principal components analysis and k-nearest neighbor techniques. We correlated moisture se...

39 S oil hydraulic parameters are essential input to most hydrologic and climatic models (Mohanty et al., 2002; Mohanty and Zhu, 2007). Th ey are used to defi ne the hydraulic characteristics of the soil vital in modeling soil moisture and fl ux in the unsaturated zone near the land–atmosphere boundary. At the scale of model applications, it is very important to defi ne the appropriate paramete...

Continuous hydrologic models account for the soil moisture balance in the catchment over a long-term period. Different hydrologic physical processes such as: interception, surface depression storage, infiltration, soil storage, percolation, and groundwater storage should be considered in continuous hydrologic modeling. In this paper, the Hydrologic Modeling System (HMS) model was used for conti...

• Soil hydrologic parameters including field saturation, field capacity, initiation of plant water stress and plant extraction limits can be reliably determined from electronic soil moisture sensor records. • Soil profile wetting and drying occurs along a regular continuum of soil moisture following the advance of the wetting from to the effective base of the soil profile. • Frozen soil conditi...