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AUTOMATED GEOSPATIAL WATERSHED ASSESSMENT (AGWA): A GIS-BASED HYDROLOGICAL MODELING TOOL FOR WATERSHED MANAGEMENT AND LANDSCAPE ASSESSMENT
Citation:
GOODRICH, D., S. SCOTT, S. BURNS, M. HERNANDEZ, A. CATE, P. GUERTIN, W. G. KEPNER, D. J. SEMMENS, AND C. UNKRICH. AUTOMATED GEOSPATIAL WATERSHED ASSESSMENT (AGWA): A GIS-BASED HYDROLOGICAL MODELING TOOL FOR WATERSHED MANAGEMENT AND LANDSCAPE ASSESSMENT. Presented at Third Federal Interagency Hydrologic Modeling Conference, Reno, NV, April 02 - 06, 2006.
Impact/Purpose:
The primary objectives of this research are to:
- Provide information on the variability in water supply that can be expected under varying climatic conditions. Early efforts will be focused on assembling regional databases for at least two counties (Mecklenberg County and York County) within SEQL region that can be used for water supply generation and model development.
- Develop tools that will help improve our ability to evaluate, study, and model linkages between different types of environmental systems: hydrologic, geomorphic, ecological, and climatic.
- Explore the use of annual and seasonal measurements of large lake surface temperatures as a new ecological indicator of the overall thermal content of those lakes, and construct an estimator of seasonal large lake heat budgets.
Description:
The Automated Geospatial Watershed Assessment (http://www.epa.gov/nerlesd1/land-sci/agwa/introduction.htm and www.tucson.ars.ag.gov/agwa) tool is a GIS interface jointly developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, USDA-Agricultural Research Service, and the University of Arizona to automate the parameterization and execution of the Soil Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) and KINEmatic Runoff and EROSion (KINEROS2) hydrologic models. By employing these two models AGWA can conduct hydrologic modeling and watershed assessments at multiple time and space scales. AGWA uses commonly available, national, GIS data layers to fully parameterize, execute, and visualize results from both the SWAT and KINEROS2. Through an intuitive interface the user selects an outlet from which AGWA delineates and discretizes the watershed using a Digital Elevation Model (DEM). The watershed model elements are then intersected with soils and land cover data layers to derive the requisite model input parameters. The chosen model is then run, and the results are imported back into AGWA for visual display. This allows managers to identify potential problem areas where additional monitoring can be undertaken or mitigation activities can be focused. AGWA can difference results from multiple simulations to examine relative change over a variety of input scenarios (e.g. climate/storm change, land cover change, present conditions and alternative futures). AGWA 1.5 (ArcView) is being released at the 3rd Federal Interagency Hydrological Modeling Conference in Reno, NV during the first week of April 2006. A variety of new capabilities have been incorporated into the new AGWA Version 1.5. They include: 1) Watershed group delineation and simulation; 2) SWAT Hydrologic Response Unit and nitrogen and phosphorus modeling; 3) Nested watershed delineation and discretization handling; 4) Burn Severity Land Cover Modification for post-fire watershed assessments; 5) KINEROS riparian buffer modeling tool; 6) Support for USGS Gap Analysis Program land cover datasets; 7) KINEROS batch processing; 8) Contributing source area enforcement for more uniformly sized model elements; 9) Watershed Metadata to allow transfers of previous AGWA assessments to new projects; and, 10) Additional display options including a time series viewer. AGWA 2.0 (ArcGIS) has been developed in beta release and will provided in final format in 2007.