Breaking walls towards fully open source hydrological modeling

Abstract

Hydrological models are powerful mathematical tools to address environmental problems and are often used for watershed management and planning. Hydrological models are data driven and the lack of data availability often limits model development. In this paper, we address several challenges in building and running a hydrological model for streamflow simulations based solely on freely available data and open source software. The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) hydrological modeling software has been used in the Map Window Geographic Information System (GIS). All spatial and non-spatial data used in this study were obtained from various free of charge online sources. Model calibration and validation represent major challenges following the initial model construction since they involve several trial and error processes to reach acceptable model performances. These critical steps were programmed here as automated scripts in the R open source statistical package. The challenges of model building are described step by step through video tutorials. Using a case study in the Mendoza watershed in Argentina, we show that simulated streamflow exhibits sound agreement with the observed streamflow considering daily time steps (NSE = 0.69, R² = 0.72 and Percent bias = +9%). The workflow demonstrated in this study can be applied for other watersheds, especially in data-sparse regions that may lack key regional or local data sets.