Untitled DocumenttRIBS model of the regional Rio Grande watershed
Macro Theme Area:
Integrated Modeling [Project ID: M26]
PI:
Enrique Vivoni
CO-PI(s):
N/A
Basin focus:
Rio Grande
Specific area in
basin /
field sites:
Valles Caldera, La Jara Catchment, Upper Rio Grande
Summary/Goals: The surface rainfall-runoff transformation is a key determinant of the watershed response to climate change, land-use variations and human impacts. The proposed project focuses on coupled atmospheric-surface-groundwater modeling in order to: (a) represent the spatial and temporal distribution of surface and subsurface hydrological processes at multiple scales over the regional Río Grande watershed, and (b) simulate the effect of climate and land-use change on the rainfall partitioning at the land-surface, surface turbulent fluxes and recharge to the aquifer system. The TIN-based Real-time Integrated Basin Simulator (tRIBS), developed by the proponent and collaborators at MIT, is the proposed model to account for the spatial variability of the continuous rainfall-runoff process. Through integration into a high performance parallel computing environment, the proposed model will improve the surface hydrology in the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) fine-resolution model, an on-going SAHRA project carried out by a team of investigators led by Dr. Everett Springer (LANL). In addition, the triangulated irregular network (TIN) model will allow computational savings as compared to grid-based models through the multi-resolution, multi-scale domain representation.
Activities and outcomes during past year:
We have made completed the development of the parallelized version of the tRIBS model with collaborators at LANL (Everett Springer and Sue Mnisweski) and are in the process of tests for larger watersheds. We have begun coding and testing of the tRIBS snow hydrology component for complex terrain. Alex Rinehart has been applying the model to two locations within Jemez Mountain. A new graduate student, Taufique Mahmood, is working on summer simulations in the Jemez River using the distributed field campaign data sets collected in 2005. One student presentation on our progress were made at the SAHRA annual meeting in Scottsdale, AZ (Oct 2006) by Alex Rinehart. We are currently developing several publications from the current efforts.
Plans for the upcoming year:
We will have completed and fully tested the snow hydrology module for tRIBS using data from the Valles Caldera. A publication on this effort is anticipated to be submitted. We finalize our analysis of the Valles Caldera field campaign and develop a manuscript for submission. We plan on completing and testing the parallelized version of the tRIBS model. We anticipate a journal manuscript from this latter effort in the upcoming months. We will commence modeling of winter and summer conditions in the Jemez River basin for comparison to field campaign data sets.
