ABSTRACT:

This is a flood modeling project that was conducted during the 2016 NOAA-National Water Center Innovator Program.

Various low-complexity flood inundation mapping tools have been developed recently as part of large-scale high resolution hydrologic prediction initiatives. However, there remains a knowledge-gap regarding the ability of these tools to capture inundation extent and depth under different scenarios of floodplain features and flood magnitudes. The objective of this study is to fill the gap by comparing two of such new generation low-complexity tools, AutoRoute and Height Above the Nearest Drainage (HAND), with a two-dimensional hydrodynamic model (Hydrologic Engineering Center-River Analysis System, HEC-RAS 2D).

This collection has a graphical abstract, all the required input data, brief outline of methodology featuring necessary pre-processing steps, sample outputs, and an instructional video tutorial.

ABSTRACT:

The 2016 NOAA-National Water Center (NWC) Innovators Program hosted 34 graduate student research fellows from 21 universities across the country from June 6 to July 20, 2016. The intent was to create an innovation incubator where students from many universities can exchange ideas and advance concepts towards the effective functioning of the National Water Model across the continental United States. During the 7-week program, the resident research fellows worked collaboratively on 12 projects specifically focusing on flood inundation and disaster response. The projects were thematically categorized in four domains: flood modeling, inundation mapping, forecast errors, and emergency response. This HydroShare collection presents a featured project with a view to aid aggregation of project outcomes and dissemination of scientific findings in similar future initiatives.

ABSTRACT:

This is a User Story of how the 2016 National Water Center Innovators used HydroShare to organize their data, run their models, and publish their research fom the summer institute.

Steps for research team members to get started with the Group:
1. Go to Collaborate in the Dashboard
2. Ask to Join the National Water Center Innovators Group. The group owner will be emailed your request, and you will be emailed a confirmation that your invitation has been accepted.

Steps for project team leaders to get started with their team Collection:
3. Go to My Resources in the Dashboard
4. New Resource - Select Collection
5. Add details with each team member as an Author
6. Invite team members to add their resources to the Team Collection.
7. Go to settings for your resource, the lock icon in the top right, and share your resource by clicking on Group, select the NWC Innvoators Group.
Now your work can be added to Collections by Adnan (summer institute data ' owner').

Steps for team members to get started with their individual resources:
8. Go to My Resources in the Dashboard
9. Create new Resources -- Upload Data - see Help on Dashboard for details on Resource Types and Settings.
10. You have a HydroShare Profile! Fill it out! Click on the top right empty icon and it will take you to a profile form where you can put your avatar or headshot.
11. Work with your team to upload their data and populate your Hydroshare Collection. Consider naming structures, list of authors and consistent descriptions that will be useful for future work. Metadata is a gift to the future!

e.g. Template for Project Organization
All summer institute 2016 Keywords: NWC Innovators, flood modeling, inundation mapping, forecasting error, emergency response; e.g. FloodHippo project keywords: FloodHIPPO, DisasterZoo, geofencing
Author order options: Summer institute recommendation - use report author order for the Collection Resource. For individual resources, list by contribution, other options include alphabetical, or listing only single owners as author.
Abstract: Consider repeating parts of the Abstract from the Collection folder with additional details on each resource included. Instructions for one line to repeat in 2016 summer project and one line to repeat with project title. (This step may become obsolete depending on hierarchy viewing functions added to the HS).
Contributors: this should be any person or institute that has given time or resources that supported the project or resource; e.g. USACE, U of Alabama.
Credits: List NSF funding for NWC.

ABSTRACT:

The objective of this study is to incorporate a time-dependent Soil Moisture Accounting (SMA) based Curve Number method (SMA_CN) in Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) and compare its performance with the existing CN method in SWAT by simulating the hydrology of two agricultural watersheds in Indiana, USA. Results show that fusion of the SMA_CN method causes decrease in runoff volume and increase in profile soil moisture content, associated with larger groundwater contribution to the streamflow. In addition, the higher amount of moisture in the soil profile slightly elevates the actual evapotranspiration. The SMA-based SWAT configuration consistently produces improved goodness-of-fit scores and less uncertain outputs with respect to streamflow during both calibration and validation. The SMA_CN method exhibits a better match with the observed data for all flow regimes, thereby addressing issues related to peak and low flow predictions by SWAT in many past studies. Comparison of the calibrated model outputs with field-scale soil moisture observations reveals that the SMA overhauling enables SWAT to represent soil moisture condition more accurately, with better response to the incident rainfall dynamics. While the results from the modification of the CN method in SWAT are promising, more studies including watersheds with various physical and climatic settings are needed to validate the proposed approach.