Publication
mizuRoute version 1: a river network routing tool for a continental domain water resources applications
Publisher:
Copernicus GmbH
Date:
02-11-2015
DOI:
10.5194/GMDD-8-9415-2015
Abstract: Abstract. This paper describes the first version of a stand-alone runoff routing tool, mizuRoute, which post-processes runoff outputs from any distributed hydrologic model or land surface model to produce spatially distributed streamflow at various spatial scales from headwater basins to continental-wide river systems. The tool can utilize both traditional grid-based river network and vector-based river network data, which includes river segment lines and the associated drainage basin polygons. Streamflow estimates at any desired location in the river network can be easily extracted from the output of mizuRoute. The routing process is simulated as two separate steps. The first is hillslope routing, which uses a gamma distribution to construct a unit-hydrograph that represents the transport of runoff from a hillslope to a catchment outlet. The second step is river channel routing, which is performed with one of two routing scheme options: (1) a kinematic wave tracking (KWT) routing procedure and (2) an impulse response function–unit hydrograph (IRF-UH) routing procedure. The mizuRoute system also includes tools to pre-process spatial river network data. This paper demonstrates mizuRoute's capabilities with spatially distributed streamflow simulations based on river networks from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) Geospatial Fabric (GF) dataset, which contains over 54 000 river segments across the contiguous United States (CONUS). A brief analysis of model parameter sensitivity is also provided. The mizuRoute tool can assist model-based water resources assessments including studies of the impacts of climate change on streamflow.