2008 Joint Annual Meeting (5-9 Oct. 2008): Simulated Long-Term Hydroclimatic Variability in the Agricultural Watersheds of Nebraska

Understanding basin-scale hydrological processes is complex. Efforts are on to close the water budget for a given watershed by the hydrological modeling community, but to assess the highly variable surface process including evapotranspiration, soil moisture over decadal time scales and to draw conclusions on their interannual variability is quite challenging. We employ the Soil Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model in this simulation exercise. In this presentation, we demonstrate the application of the SWAT (Soil Water Assessment Tool) model over a few large basins in Nebraska and verify the results with the Automated Weather Data Network (AWDN) soil moisture observations. Analysis shown in this presentation on the long term hydro-climatic variability provides us the means to understand the change in the surface hydrological processes and their scale as well as drivers and in turn can be useful for agricultural drought assessment and water resources management.