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ARS Home » Pacific West Area » Tucson, Arizona » SWRC » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #190116
Title: KINEROS2 - NEW FEATURES AND CAPABILITIES 1799

Author
item Goodrich, David - Dave
item Unkrich, Carl
item SMITH, R. - RETIRED ARS
item WOOLHISER, D. - RETIRED ARS

Submitted to: Federal Interagency Hydrologic Modeling Conference
Publication Type: Proceedings
Publication Acceptance Date: 4/2/2006
Publication Date: 7/15/2006
Citation: Goodrich, D.C., Unkrich, C.L., Smith, R., Woolhiser, D. Kineros2 - new features and capabilities. Proc. 3rd Fed. Interagency Hydrologic Modeling Conf., April 2-6, 2006. Reno, Nevada. 2006 CDROM.

Interpretive Summary: When water quantity or water quality is of interest, watersheds are a natural organizing unit in our landscape. Watersheds gather rainfall, infiltrated water, and runoff and typically discharge that water at a stream location or into a body of water such as a lake or estuary. The pathways and processes that affect runoff generation from a watershed result from a complex interaction of the climate, topography, soils, land cover, and land use. Numerous computer models have been developed to estimate how a watershed produces runoff from rainfall and snowfall. The KINEROS2 model is one such model which can be obtained, with additional documentation and information, from www.tucson.ars.ag.gov/kineros. With KINEROS2, natural resource managers, engineers, and scientists can estimate runoff and places in the watershed that may be prone to flood damage or water quality problems. These users can also evaluate how conservation measures and changes in land use practices might improve water quality. This paper provides an overview of the new features and capabilities of KINEROS2.

Technical Abstract: KINEROS2 (K2) is a broadly updated version of the KINEROS kinematic runoff and erosion model. KINEROS/K2 has traditionally been an event-, physically-based model describing the processes of interception, infiltration, runoff generation, erosion, and sediment transport from small agricultural and urban watersheds for individual rainfall-runoff events. Recently the model has undergone a major restructuring. This has enabled the addition of several major enhancements by incorporating sub-models of OPUS. These include making the model continuous and the ability to treat various agricultural management practices and water quality. Within a suitable application structure, the restructured program objects can accommodate various operational requirements such as time-space versus space-time looping, and also have the ability to return to an internal state saved from a previous computational time step. This allows the model to be used as a real-time forecasting tool. While K2 evolved primarily as a research tool it is currently being used in consulting and in a more operational watershed assessment context. This has been facilitated by the incorporation of K2 into the AGWA (Automated Geospatial Watershed Assessment) tool in support of US-EPA landscape analysis activities (see companion paper and computer demonstration). This paper and the associated computer demonstration of K2 will focus on new model features that have not been previously presented in the literature as well as an example forecast application.