Engineering Commons^™

Development And Application Of A Hydroclimatological Stream Temperature Model Within The Soil And Water Assessment Tool, Darren L. Ficklin, Yuzhou Luo, Iris T. Stewart-Frey, Edwin P. Maurer

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering

We develop a stream temperature model within the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) that reflects the combined influence of meteorological (air temperature) and hydrological conditions (streamflow, snowmelt, groundwater, surface runoff, and lateral soil flow) on water temperature within a watershed. SWAT currently uses a linear air-stream temperature relationship to determine stream temperature, without consideration of watershed hydrology. As SWAT uses stream temperature to model various in-stream biological and water quality processes, an improvement of the stream temperature model will result in improved accuracy in modeling these processes. The new stream temperature model is tested on seven coastal and mountainous …