New Mexico Geological Society Annual Spring Meeting — Abstracts

A common problem in applied hydrology is the estimation of hydrological behavior of ungauged watersheds. One approach to this problem is to use comparative hydrology, which seeks to transfer hydrological information from a gauged site to the ungauged site. The main objective of this study is to implement this strategy on watersheds in New Mexico using model calibration and validation to solve the problem of the lack of stream flow records. This is being accomplished using the physically-based, distributed, Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT). Our approach is to use gauged watersheds as surrogates for ungauged watersheds so that our results can be verified. The two ways in which hydrologic information can be transferred within or between watesheds are via a spatial or a temporal transformation. We have accomplished the temporal transformation of parameters in the Mimbres Basin of southwest New Mexico during the period from 2002 to 2008 using several different scenarios: transfer parameters from the period 2002-2005 to 2005-2008, from 2005-2008 to 2002-2005, and from 2003-2006 to 2005- 2008. These three scenarios resulted in Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiencies (NSE) of 0.40, 0.44, and 0.43, respectively. The spatial transfer within a watershed has already been conducted; i.e., a NSE was 0.64 when transferring parameters from Embudo Creek to Rio Pueblo near Penasco and it was - 0.22 when parameters were transferred from Rio Pueblo near Penasco to Embudo Creek (Embudo Creek contains the Rio Pueblo in its upper reaches). In addition to the temporal and within watershed transformation of parameters, we are also performing a spatial transformation among 5 watersheds in northern New Mexico: Vermejo River near Dawson, Cimarron River near Cimarron, Rio de Taos below Los Cordovas, Embudo Creek at Dixon and the Jemez River near Jemez. The details of this work and the results of the spatial transformation will be discussed.