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ARS Home » Southeast Area » Oxford, Mississippi » National Sedimentation Laboratory » Watershed Physical Processes Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #382280
Research Project: Managing Water and Sediment Movement in Agricultural Watersheds

Location: Watershed Physical Processes Research

Title: Integrated technology for evaluation and assessment of multi-scale hydrological systems in managing nonpoint source pollution

Author
item MOMM, HENRIQUE - Middle Tennessee State University
item Bingner, Ronald - Ron
item Wells, Robert - Rob
item MOORE, KATY - Middle Tennessee State University
item Herring, Glenn

Submitted to: Water
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 3/14/2021
Publication Date: 3/19/2021
Publication URL: https://handle.nal.usda.gov/10113/7322772
Citation: Momm, H., Bingner, R.L., Wells, R.R., Moore, K., Herring, G.E. 2021. Integrated technology for evaluation and assessment of multi-scale hydrological systems in managing nonpoint source pollution. Water. 13:842.

Interpretive Summary: Conservation management planning agencies need information to guide planning activities and allocation of limited mitigation resources at regional scales. An integrated approach to analyze individual fields based on multiple management, landscape, and combined management-landscape conditions with links to a larger scale analyses would be a valuable management tool. In this study, integrated watershed technology was developed to characterize water and non-point source pollution at basin-scales through integrated field-scale analyses providing optimization of computer resources at larger scales. The integrated technology was shown to provide similar results when applying individual simulations to smaller areas linked together compared to when simulating all the areas in one simulation. This study revealed the integrated approach is a viable option to increase computational efficiency when simulating large areas at high spatiotemporal resolutions.

Technical Abstract: Conservation agencies need information to guide planning activities and allocation of limited mitigation resources at regional scales. Utilization of hydrological modeling tools at sub-watershed scales can adequately represent existing conditions but information on few discrete uncoordinated efforts cannot be scaled up to the entire region. Conversely, large scale modeling studies suffer from over generalization caused by needed lumping of information. In this study, a multiscale and standardized procedure was sought to characterize water and non-point source pollution spatiotemporal dynamics at basin-scale but through detailed field-scale analysis. The AnnAGNPS watershed pollution model was enhanced with new capabilities for simulation of large areas based on an Integrated Technology for Evaluation and Assessment of Multi-scale-hydrological Systems (ITEAMS) approach. Comparisons between the standard and proposed ITEAMS approach indicated no difference in streamflow and small under estimation of suspended sediments during high intensity rainfall events. The ITEAMS approach was applied to a basin with a total area of 3,268,691ha which was discretized into 469,628 sub-catchments with average size of 6.8ha. The resulting 366 linked AnnAGNPS simulations were executed hierarchically generating estimates of water and suspended sediment yield and loads. This pilot study revealed the ITEAMS approach is a viable alternative for modeling and simulating large areas but at high spatiotemporal resolution.