Discretization Approach in Integrated Hydrologic Model for Surface and Groundwater Interaction

The commonly used discretization approaches for distributed hydrological models can be broadly categorized into four types,based on the nature of the discrete components:Regular Mesh,Triangular Irregular Networks(TINs),Representative Elementary Watershed(REWs) and Hydrologic Response Units(HRUs).In this paper,a new discretization approach for landforms that have similar hydrologic properties is developed and discussed here for the Integrated Hydrologic Model(IHM),a combining simulation of surface and groundwater processes,accounting for the interaction between the systems.The approach used in the IHM is to disaggregate basin parameters into discrete landforms that have similar hydrologic properties.These landforms may be impervious areas,related areas,areas with high or low clay or organic fractions,areas with significantly different depths-to-water-table,and areas with different types of land cover or different land uses.Incorporating discrete landforms within basins allows significant distributed parameter analysis,but requires an efficient computational structure.The IHM integration represents a new approach interpreting fluxes across the model interface and storages near the interface for transfer to the appropriate model component,accounting for the disparate discretization while rigidly maintaining mass conservation.The discretization approaches employed in IHM will provide some ideas and insights which are helpful to those researchers who have been working on the integrated models for surface-groundwater interaction.

Numerical Modeling of Shallow Water Table Behavior with Lisse Effect

Air entrapment is an important consideration in environments with shallow water tables and sandy soil, like the condition of highly conductive sandy soils and flat topography in Florida, USA. It causes water table rises in soils, which are significantly faster and higher than those in soils without air entrapment. Two numerical models, Integrated Hydrologic Model (IHM) and HYDRUS-1D (a single-phase, one-dimensional Richards′ equation model) were tested at an area of west central Florida to help further understanding the shallow water table behavior during a long term air entrapment. This investigation employed field data with two modeling approaches to quantify the variation of air pressurization values. It was found that the air pressurization effect was responsible at time up to 40 cm of water table rise being recorded by the observation well for these two models. The values of air pressurization calculated from IHM and HYDRUS-1D match the previously published values. Results also indicated that the two numerical models did not consider air entrapment effect (as the predictive parameters remain uncertain) and thus results of depth to water table from these models did not compare to the observations for these selected periods. Incorporating air entrapment in prediction models is critical to reproduce shallow water table observations.

A physics-based hydro-geomorphologic simulation utilizing cluster parallel computing

To conduct a large-scale hydrologic-response and landform evolution simulation at high resolution,a complex physics-based numerical model,the Integrated Hydrology Model(InHM),was revised utilizing cluster parallel computing.The parallelized InHM(ParInHM) divides the simulated area into multiple catchments based on geomorphologic features,and generates boundary-value problems for each catchment to construct simulation tasks,which are then dispatched to different computers to start the simulation.Landform evolution is considered during simulating and implemention in one framework.The dynamical Longest-Processing-Time(LPT) first scheduling algorithm is applied to job management.In addition,a pause-integratedivide-resume routine method is used to ensure the hydrologic validity during the simulation period.The routine repeats until the entire simulation period is finished.ParInHM has been tested in a computer cluster that uses 16 processors for the calculation,to simulate 100 years' hydrologic-response and soil erosion for the 117-km2 Kaho'olawe Island in the Hawaiian Islands under two different mesh resolutions.The efficiency of ParInHM was evaluated by comparing the performance of the cluster system utilizing different numbers of processors,as well as the performance of non-parallelized system without domain decomposition.The results of this study show that it is feasible to conduct a regional-scale hydrologic-response and sediment transport simulation at high resolution without demanding significant computing resources.

Physically-based approach to analyze rainfall-triggered landslide using hydraulic gradient as slide direction

An infinite slope stability numerical model driven by the comprehensive physically-based integrated hydrology model(InHM) is presented.In this approach,the failure plane is assumed to be parallel to the hydraulic gradient instead of the slope surface.The method helps with irregularities in complex terrain since depressions and flat areas are allowed in the model.The present model has been tested for two synthetic single slopes and a small catchment in the Mettman Ridge study area in Oregon,United States,to estimate the shallow landslide susceptibility.The results show that the present approach can reduce the simulation error of hydrological factors caused by the rolling topography and depressions,and is capable of estimating spatial-temporal variations for landslide susceptibilities at simple slopes as well as at catchment scale,providing a valuable tool for the prediction of shallow landslides.