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TMDL RUSLE MODEL
Citation:
Impact/Purpose:
Develop, test, and refine models to evaluate sub-basins to determine whether local water quality problems due to excessive nutrient loading exist, and if so, to characterize them and determine their relationships to nutrient loading. Develop models to simulate overland flow and non-point source pollutant loads to track and assess nutrient loadings across watersheds and provide approaches for estimating nutrient budgets within sub-basins and for predicting changes in nutrient budgets in response to changes in watershed activities/land use/land cover. Demonstrate the application of the recommended approach/models for predicting changes in nutrient budgets in response to changes in proposed watershed activities/land use/land cover, resulting in specific recommendations for reducing the nutrient loads to a basin. For coherence, cooperation, and economics, these models will be housed in a unified, consistent, computational environment for environmental analyses that allows teaching (i.e., technology transfer) to multiple users (users concentrate on problem, not model input/output); that appeals to multi-disciplinary groups for distribution and use as a consistent assessment methodology (includes models, tools, modular design and facilitated updates of science/engineering); that includes resident visualization, animation tools, documentation and tutorials on-line, hooks to GIS and environmental databases; and is executable on UNIX, personal computers, and HPC resources.
Objective # 2.2 Conserve and enhance nation's waters: By 2005, conserve and enhance the ecological health of the nation's (state, interstate, and tribal) waters and aquatic ecosystems-rivers and streams, lakes, wetlands, estuaries, coastal areas, oceans, and groundwater-so that 75% of waters will support healthy aquatic communities.
Description:
We developed a simplified spreadsheet modeling approach for characterizing and prioritizing sources of sediment loadings from watersheds in the United States. A simplified modeling approach was developed to evaluate sediment loadings from watersheds and selected land segments. The proposed model(s) consist of sediment loadings from the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE). The model is written in Visual Basic programming language that can be run on most laptop of PC type computers under windows environment (98, 2000 and NT) or from an Web site. Simplified inputs are required. The program provides overland sediment loadings to the stream reach. The proposed spreadsheet model is designed to enable personnel involved in evaluating the impacts of such things as human activities, agricultural practices, and land use changes on achieving a Total Maximum Daily Load for a stream in which the impairment was caused by sediment.