Continental scale hydrostratigraphy: comparing geologically informed data products to analytical solutions

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. The published version of this Preprint is available: https://doi.org/10.1111/gwat.13354. This is version 1 of this Preprint.

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Authors

Jackson Swilley, Danielle Tijerina-Kreuzer, Hoang Tran, Jun Zhang, Chen Yang, Laura Condon, Reed Maxwell

Abstract

This study synthesizes two different methods for estimating hydraulic conductivity (K) at large scales. We derive analytical approaches that estimate K and apply them to the contiguous US. We then compare these analytical approaches to three-dimensional, national gridded K data products and three transmissivity (T) data products developed from publicly available sources. We evaluate these data products using multiple approaches: comparing their statistics qualitatively and quantitatively and with hydrologic model simulations. Some of these datasets were used as inputs for an integrated hydrologic model of the Upper Colorado River Basin and the comparison of the results with observations was used to further evaluate the K data products. Simulated average daily streamflow was compared to daily flow data from 10 USGS stream gages in the domain, and annually averaged simulated groundwater depths are compared to observations from nearly 2,000 monitoring wells. We find streamflow predictions from analytically informed simulations to be similar in relative bias and Spearman’s rho to the geologically informed simulations. R-squared values for groundwater depth predictions are close between the best performing analytically and geologically informed simulations at 0.68 and 0.70 respectively, with RMSE values under 10m. We also show that the analytical approach derived by this study produces estimates of K that are similar in spatial distribution, standard deviation, mean value, and modeling performance to geologically-informed estimates. The results of this work are used to inform a follow-on study that tests additional data-driven approaches in multiple basins within the contiguous US.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31223/X5J95C

Subjects

Civil and Environmental Engineering, Geology, Hydrology

Keywords

Dates

Published: 2023-09-12 00:45

License

CC BY Attribution 4.0 International

Additional Metadata

Conflict of interest statement:
None

Data Availability (Reason not available):
The data will be available freely via HydroFrame project as noted in the manuscript.