Abstract

Projections of climate and land use changes suggest that there will be significant alterations to the hydrology of the Upper Midwest. Forecasting those changes at egional scales requires new modeling tools that take advantage of increases in computational power and the latest GIS and remote-­sensing datasets. Because if the need to resolve fine-­scale processes, fully coupled numerical simulations of regional watersheds are still prohibitive. Although semi-­distributed lumped-parameter models are an alternative, they are often not able to accurately forecast across a broad range of hydrologic conditions such as those associated with climate and land use changes.

We have developed a loosely coupled suite of hydrologic codes called the Integrated Landscape Hydrology Model (ILHM), which combines readily available numerical and energy- and mass-­balance modeling codes with novel routines. In this paper, the ILHM is used to predict hydrologic fluxes through a 130 km2 portion of the Muskegon River Watershed in northern-­lower Michigan. We combine GIS maps of the land cover, soils, and sediments with a variety of gaged and remotely sensed data for this watershed to simulate evapotranspiration, groundwater recharge, and stream discharge from 1990–2004. These estimates are compared to measured stream discharge data to demonstrate the capability of the ILHM to provide reasonable predictions of groundwater recharge with minimal calibration. The results begin to illustrate critical differences in hydrologic processes due to land cover and climate variability, including a demonstration that approximately 75% of precipitation becomes recharge during leaf-­off periods while almost no recharge occurs during the growing season.

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Hyndman et al. 2007